The Sirens Sang of Murder

CHAPTER 18

On the evening before her departure for the Bahamas — she had been advised that it would be prudent, in all the circumstances, to take up residence outside the United Kingdom — Lilian had invited all those who had been, as she expressed it, so kind to her while she was working in Chambers, to join her for a farewell glass of champagne in the Corkscrew. She stood at the bar, blushing slightly at the competition between Cantrip and Henry to refill her glass and responding with charming smiles to the congratulations of Timothy, the improving advice of Ragwort, and the dulcet laments of Basil Ptarmigan for the loss of so decorative and skilful a telex operator. A month before she would no doubt have been embarrassed to find herself at the centre of such a circle; but to become the sole beneficiary of a trust fund worth nine million pounds sterling has a remarkable effect on a young woman’s self-confidence.

Withdrawing a little from the throng surrounding her, I found myself sharing a candlelit table with Clementine and Julia.

“My dear Clementine,” I said, “do tell me how exactly you discovered that it was Lilian’s uncle who established the Daffodil trust. She has been thanking me very prettily for all that I have done for her, but I felt obliged to say that so far as I am aware my own investigation played no part in the discovery.”

“I suppose you could say,” said Clementine, “that it’s Cantrip she’s mostly got to thank for it — I mean he was the one who got me to stir up our Probate Department about the books her uncle left her. You see, Oliver Grynne got the news of her uncle’s death just before that last meeting in the Cayman Islands, and he didn’t have time to do much about it except bung all the files across to Probate Department, with a note saying he’d discuss it with them when he got back. It’s perfectly normal procedure,” added Clementine rather defensively, “where we’re appointed executors of the will.”

“And no doubt,” I said, “everything would have gone quite smoothly if Oliver Grynne had in fact returned from the Cayman Islands.”

“Absolutely, but of course he didn’t. So Probate Department just went into their standard routine, which doesn’t include going through the correspondence files for the past umpteen years. They got as far as finding that the estate was worth twelve thousand quid — of course the whole idea of the settlement had been that the settlor wouldn’t have anything in his own name — and they sort of lost interest. I mean they put the case at the bottom of the pile, and when a case gets put at the bottom of the pile in Probate Department, it tends to be a century or two before it’s heard of again.”

“And when you were unable to find anything in Oliver Grynne’s files which seemed relevant to the Daffodil settlement, I suppose it would not have occurred to you…?” I paused, fearing the question to be tactless.

“To ask Probate Department? Of course it occurred to me,” said Clementine with asperity. “I rampaged up and down the office like a lunatic trying to find out whether Oliver had passed any of his files on to anyone, and they were the first people I asked. But you know what Probate Departments are like. I told them the files I was looking for were connected with a nine-million-quid trust fund and it didn’t cross their tiny minds that a fund that size could have anything to do with an estate worth twelve hundred. So it wasn’t until they had to fish the papers out again to deal with Lilian’s bequest that someone noticed a letter referring to a settlement and the penny finally dropped.”

Julia had been sitting in anxious silence, looking frequently at her watch and as often towards the doorway.

“I can’t understand,” she said, “why Selena isn’t here yet — I hope it doesn’t mean that things have gone badly.”

It was the day of Colonel Cantrip’s trial, and Selena had been prevailed upon to undertake his defence. The arm movements which Julia had observed at the cloakroom window on taking off from the helicopter club had not been the friendly waves of valediction with which one amateur of aviation bids Godspeed to another; they had been the gestures by which a financier locked in a cloakroom and from there observing the theft of his private helicopter expresses his intention to instigate criminal proceedings at the earliest opportunity. Thus it was that the triumphant landing of the Colonel and his three passengers on a beach just west of St. Helier had been slightly marred by their immediate arrest, and that he was today being tried by a bench of lay magistrates somewhere in the Home Counties on a number of charges arising out of the incident.

“I think it’s frightfully mean to go on with the prosecution,” said Clementine. “After all, if the Colonel hadn’t turned up with the helicopter, Gabrielle and Cantrip would have been drowned.”

“The financier,” said Julia, “appears to regard that as a matter of trifling importance by comparison with his meeting in Le Touquet, and has insisted on pressing charges.”

“I didn’t know,” said Clementine, “that Selena ever did any criminal work.”

“She doesn’t. But the Colonel showed a touching determination to be defended by a member of Cantrip’s Chambers, and Selena did once do a common-law pu-pillage. She didn’t seem to think it would be helpful for Cantrip and me to give evidence — indeed, she has expressly forbidden us to go anywhere near the place. Clementine, you don’t think they’d send the Colonel to prison, do you?”

“Oh no,” said the young solicitor, “I shouldn’t think so. Not at his age. Well, not for very long, anyway.”

A further bottle of champagne had appeared as if by magic on our table, but it failed to distract Julia from troubled thoughts of the Colonel. She continued to glance anxiously at the doorway in which Selena still persistently failed to appear.

Between Clementine and myself there was perhaps a certain constraint. In the hours following the death of the Count di Silvabianca I had had no opportunity for any private conversation with her. She had been occupied with the task of arranging Gabrielle’s return to the comforting refuge of her mother’s house in Brittany, while Patrick Ardmore devoted his energies to securing the release on bail of Julia and the Colonel. (He was fortunately on terms of friendship with a senior Jersey police officer, to whom he explained that they were both personally known to him and were of the highest character and respectability.) She still felt some embarrassment, I suppose, at the suddenness with which she had asked me to terminate my investigation and now seemed to think it appropriate to give some hint of her reason.

“You know, Professor Tamar,” she said, refilling my glass, “there was suddenly a ghastly moment, after I’d asked you to investigate the Daffodil case, when I thought you might suspect me of bumping off poor old Oliver and Edward myself. You didn’t ever, did you?”

“My dear Clementine,” I said, “not for a moment.” The period during which I had done so had been so brief as to make any mention of it an excess of candour.

“Because we knew, of course…” Julia paused in time to save herself from what she supposed an indiscretion. Since Cantrip was not to be undeceived as to the identity of his bedfellow on Walpurgis Night, I had thought it unwise to enlighten Julia. She was accordingly still under the impression that Clementine had an alibi. “Of course we knew, Clementine, that you would never dream of such a thing.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t think it was me. But I can see that in a way it might be quite a logical thing to think — I mean, I am engaged to one of the default beneficiaries under the settlement, so I’d have had a motive.”

“But if,” I said, “you had decided to commit murder for the motive which you suggest, you would certainly not have done so in circumstances which would direct attention towards the provisions of the settlement — a meeting of the Daffodil advisers was the very last occasion you would have chosen. The same was also true, of course, of the other beneficiaries. I therefore reached the conclusion — much later, I confess, than I ought to have done — that the fact of the deaths occurring at meetings of the Daffodil advisers made it virtually certain that they were quite unconnected with the provisions of the settlement.”

“I say,” said Clementine, “how frightfully subtle.”

“My dear Clementine,” I said, “it is kind of you to say so, but to one versed in the art or science of textual criticism it is a very simple piece of reasoning — one learns to distrust the reading which seems at first sight to be the most obvious. The question which remained was whether the deaths were, after all, merely coincidental or whether there was some other distinctive feature of the Daffodil meetings, quite apart from their subject matter, which might make them occasions for murder. One feature, of course, was that they were the occasions when Gabrielle di Silvabianca travelled abroad without her husband.”

“Hilary,” said Julia, “this is the twentieth century.”

“Quite so, my dear Julia, but the fact weighs more with some than with others. An attractive married woman, of adventurous temperament, is travelling away from home. She has the impression that someone is watching her, and two of the men in whose company she spends her time meet possibly violent deaths. A hundred years ago many people would have thought it obvious, some might think it so even nowadays, that her husband was the person responsible. If it does not seem so to us, it is not merely because we do not think of matrimonial jealousy as a sufficient motive for murder. It is also because it would not occur to us to describe what took place in the terms I have just suggested. We would tell an entirely different story — a story of trust funds and companies, in which the husband has no significant role. I was as misguided, in the initial stages of my investigation, as a person who tries to decipher an inscription in Latin believing it to be in English.”

“If one knew no Latin,” said Julia absentmindedly, “it would be difficult to perceive one’s error.”

“Certainly, but I cannot claim so complete an ignorance of human passion as to justify my obtuseness. If I had considered the possibility that the story was one of passion rather than tax planning, the truth would very soon have become clear. You had told me, Clementine, when we first spoke of the matter, of Oliver Grynne’s admiration for Gabrielle, and I already knew that Malvoisin had from time to time made advances to her. You mentioned also that her husband resented her travelling abroad on business. I chose, without conscious reflection, to treat these things as irrelevant to my inquiry. Nor did I ask myself, as I should have done, why, out of all the Daffodil advisers, it should be Gabrielle who was singled out for surveillance. And I failed, above all, to reflect on the oddness of her being alarmed about it. She had not struck Cantrip, nor when I met her did she strike me, as a woman who would be unduly anxious about being watched by the Inland Revenue or anyone of that sort — one would have expected her to find it rather stimulating.”

“Oh, look here,” said Clementine, “you’re not saying she knew all along it was her husband watching her?”

“Consciously, certainly not. He employed, no doubt, some quite effective form of disguise — false beard and dark glasses and so forth — and took care to keep at a safe distance. Such devices, however, can seldom deceive a person who knows one well, and the unconscious mind, as we know, often observes and reasons far more efficiently than the conscious. I do not doubt that at some quite early stage she observed something about the person following her which to her unconscious mind unmistakably identified him as her husband. Her conscious mind, however, would quite naturally have rejected this conclusion as unthinkable, and the conflict between the two would be more than enough to account for her nervousness. It must have been much worse, of course, after the death of Oliver Grynne.”

“The idiotic thing is,” said Clementine, “that she wasn’t having any sort of affair with either Oliver or Edward. Oliver adored her, of course, and she quite enjoyed flirting with him a bit, but I’m pretty sure that’s all there was to it. Anyway, she’d been going to Daffodil meetings for years — why did her husband suddenly go off the deep end?”

“It’s clear enough that she married the Count for his looks, and perhaps finding something glamorous about his success as a sportsman. After some years of marriage she remained fond of him and reluctant to hurt his feelings, but his company provided her neither with intellectual stimulus nor with that element of excitement which someone like Gabrielle requires as a seasoning to everyday existence.”

“You mean he bored her,” said Clementine.

“Quite so. The interruptions to her customary routine afforded by the Daffodil meetings must have become, in these circumstances, increasingly agreeable, and her husband no doubt noted all too well how her eyes brightened and her spirits rose at the prospect or recollection of them. The inference that they were opportunities for her to meet a lover must have seemed to him almost irresistible, and so he began to make plans to keep watch on her. The suspicions of jealousy can be confirmed but seldom allayed — once he had reached this point it was almost inevitable that sooner or later he would see something which seemed to him conclusive of his wife’s infidelity. Something happened in the Cayman Islands which convinced him that she and Oliver Grynne were lovers, and for him it followed that Oliver Grynne must die.”

“Of course,” said Clementine, “foreigners do tend to overreact a bit about things like that, don’t they? Latin temperament and so on.”

“I think,” I said, “that it is less a matter of temperament than of literary tradition. People do what books have taught them to do and feel what books have taught them to feel — it is curiously difficult to do otherwise. There is a tradition in Romance literature which regards jealousy as a requirement of honour.”

Julia’s glances at the doorway were at last rewarded by the appearance there of Selena. Our table being at the furthest end of the room, we could not judge, in the murky light of the Corkscrew, whether her expression was downcast or triumphant. I supposed we would know soon enough what sentence the magistrates had imposed; but Julia rose, champagne glass in hand, and began to manoeuvre her way, with difficulty and apologies, through the intervening groups of gossiping lawyers and journalists.

“But look here,” said Clementine, “if the Count thought Oliver was the one she was having it off with, why did he go on following her after he’d got rid of him? And how on earth did he get the idea she was having an affair with Edward?”

“The appetite of jealousy is insatiable. No sooner had he disposed, as he imagined, of one lover than he began to fear a successor. So when his wife went to the Channel Islands for the next Daffodil meeting, he followed her again, and again kept watch. He watched as she wandered round Jersey with Cantrip. He watched as she made her way to Sark disguised as a Breton peasant woman — of course he knew all about that. He watched as she retired to the Witch’s Cottage for the night in the company of Cantrip and yourself, and he was still watching an hour or so later when a woman of similar build, wrapped up, I suppose, in a white coat or raincoat, came out of the cottage again and went to meet Edward Malvoisin. My dear Clementine, I do not wish to seem critical, but it would have been helpful, you know, if you had told me of your assignation with him.”

“Oh dear. I’m very sorry, Professor Tamar, I know I ought to have told you. But you see…” She looked round to make sure that none of those nearby was paying any heed to our conversation. “You see, I thought you’d be bound to be discussing the case with Cantrip, and if he knew I was meeting Edward, he’d know it must have been Gabrielle who was with him in the cottage. So I thought it would be a bit unsporting of me to say anything about it without talking it over with her, and then — well, everything happened before I had a chance to. But she says you’d worked it out anyway, about us switching places after the lights went out.”

“Later, I fear, than I ought to have done. I knew of the wager you had made with Edward Malvoisin that he would not walk across the Coupee at midnight, and I should have inferred from that that you had a rendezvous with him.”

“I just meant it as a joke at first, but then Edward said he was game to do it as long as I came with him as far as the Coupee to cheer him on his way. So of course I said I would. It turned out a perfectly beastly night — black as pitch with a gale-force wind — but I was blowed if I was going to be the first to cry off, and I suppose Edward felt the same, so we went ahead.”

“He went across the Coupee and you sat and waited for him, I suppose, on one of the benches at the approach to it?”

“That’s right. There’s a sort of antique cannon on the far side, and the idea was that he’d unscrew the brass plate on it and bring it back to prove he’d been all the way across. We’d have put it back next day, of course. Anyway, he was gone much longer than I’d expected, and I started getting a bit — well, not worried exactly. More like miffed, really — I thought he was doing it on purpose to see if I’d come after him. Then I heard the carriage coming across the Coupee and the noise of it crashing, so of course I went down to see if I could help, but Albert didn’t seem to appreciate it. I could see that if Edward was on the other side he wouldn’t be able to get back, but I just thought — well, I’m afraid I just thought it served him right rather for playing the fool and keeping me hanging about in the dark. So I went back to the Witch’s Cottage and went to bed.”

She bit her knuckles and looked disconsolately at the flickering candle which provided our illumination.

“Poor old Edward, I quite fancied him in a silly sort of way, and I suppose you could say I sent him to his death.”

“My dear Clementine,” I said, anxious to dispel any notion so lowering to the spirits, “you could not possibly have foreseen that there was any danger. I do not doubt, moreover, that if you had not emerged when you did from the cottage, the Count would later that night have found some means to gain entry to it. If he had found Cantrip and Gabrielle in each other’s arms—”

Warm as the evening was, Clementine shivered.

“How do you think he found out about them in the end?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “that he ever guessed the truth about the night in the Witch’s Cottage. But surely it must have been Cantrip whom he initially suspected — consider the amount of time that he and Gabrielle had spent together in Jersey. And afterwards in Monaco — one could see all too easily that Gabrielle found Cantrip more entertaining company than her husband. Moreover, the trap which the Count eventually set for them — the spurious invitations to meet at St. Clement’s Bay — would have seemed self-justifying. To have declined the invitation would have been evidence of innocence; to accept, in his eyes, conclusive of guilt.”

“But it was the first time he’d tried to do any harm to Gabrielle — do you think he’d always meant to or was he just getting worse and worse?”

“Pathological jealousy is no doubt a progressive disorder, but I suspect that he always intended her to die in the end. He wished her to live long enough, however, to feel pain for the loss of her supposed lovers. That, as I understand it, is the classic pattern of the jealous revenge. The rival must die: the faithless spouse must suffer and die.”

A crescendo of cheering and exploding champagne corks among those gathered at the bar had already indicated that Selena bore victorious tidings and was lingering there to relate the particulars of her success. I had little fear of missing them; it is seldom that any member of Lincoln’s Inn is reluctant to repeat a story of forensic triumph. In due course she and Julia made their way to our table.

“I can’t really claim,” said Selena, demurely sipping her champagne, “that it was anything to do with my skill in advocacy. I had quite a nice little speech ready, based on a plea in mitigation I once did for some juvenile delinquents when I was a pupil in the Temple — all about the Colonel being the inevitable product of a society which encouraged aggression and glamourised violence and not being morally responsible for his actions and so on — but I didn’t have to use it. The financier had a change of heart. Just before the case was due to be heard he told Counsel for the prosecution that he thought he might have said something in his conversation with the Colonel which the Colonel might have understood as permission to fly the helicopter. So all charges were dismissed and the Colonel left the court without a stain on his character.”

“How extraordinary,” said Clementine. “Did the financier have a specially nice lunch or something?”

“Possibly,” said Selena. “Actually, it seemed to happen just after I mentioned to Counsel for the prosecution that I naturally intended to cross-examine his witness about the meeting in Le Touquet — after all, if it was part of their case that we’d made him miss an important meeting, we were entitled to know what it was about and who was there. It’s possible, I suppose, that he didn’t want the details to be generally known, and with the legal affairs correspondent of the Financial Times sitting in the press benches…”

“The F.T. correspondent?” said Clementine. “What on earth was he doing covering a criminal case in a provincial magistrates court?”

“Oh,” said Selena, “I always let him know when I have a case he might be interested in. It’s very important to maintain good relations with the press, don’t you think?”

It was several minutes — a surprisingly long time, considering the company I was in — before it occurred to anyone to suggest that it was my fault that the Colonel had stolen the helicopter: Why had the truth not occurred to me until eleven o’clock on the night before the last Daffodil meeting? If I had thought of it sooner, the whole helicopter adventure would have been quite unnecessary. I explained patiently that it was not until eleven o’clock on the night before the meeting that I had studied Gabrielle’s chequebook.

“I expect,” said Selena, with an air of indulgent generosity, “that you would like to explain to us about the chequebook.”

“Until I saw the chequebook I had assumed that the fountain pen which Gabrielle had lost was the same one which Patrick Ardmore had found — it would have seemed perverse to imagine otherwise. That meant either that Gabrielle herself had dropped the pen on the Coupee or that someone had stolen or borrowed it from her before she left Sark.”

“Yes,” said Selena, “of course.”

“The chequebook included the counterfoils for the period of Gabrielle’s visit to the Channel Islands, and they had all been completed in ink, with a fountain pen rather than a ballpoint. The next counterfoil after these recorded a withdrawal from a bank in St. Malo on the first of May — the day that Gabrielle left Sark. It was in the same hand, in the same ink, and beyond all shadow of doubt written with the same pen — as a student of ancient and medieval manuscripts, I am not without experience of such questions. It was clear then that when Gabrielle reached St. Malo she still had with her the fountain pen she had been using in the Channel Islands. Once I knew that, I could have no doubt of her husband’s guilt.”

“I suppose you mean,” said Selena, frowning slightly, “that he was the only person who had the chance to steal it between the time she used it in St. Malo and the time she discovered it was missing?”

“I couldn’t be absolutely sure of that, though it would have been easier for him than for anyone else — no doubt he took it while she was changing for dinner. But if Gabrielle still had the original pen in St. Malo, then the pen which Patrick Ardmore found on the Coupee must have been a duplicate. As Ragwort pointed out earlier, the pen was not an item which any jeweller who valued his reputation would duplicate without the authority of the original customer. The Count was the original customer.”

“I say,” said Clementine, “do you mean he had a copy made in advance to frame Gabrielle for the murder?”

“I don’t suppose,” I said, “that when he ordered the duplicate he had any precise plans for its use, but I have little doubt that he expected it to be in some way of use to him in perfecting his revenge. He would not have intended, I think, that she should actually be charged with the murder — merely that she should be exposed to a sufficient degree of suspicion to compound her distress for the loss of her lover.”

Julia renewed her complaint that the pen was a deplorably old-fashioned clue. No doubt she was right; but we had been dealing, as I pointed out, with a deplorably old-fashioned murder.