The Sirens Sang of Murder

by Sarah Caudwell

  ‘Except,’ said Julia, ‘that he’d given up alcohol on health grounds several years before. He was a strict teetotaller.’

  The candlelit shadows of the Corkscrew seemed for a moment less companionable than usual, and I felt for the first time the curious sensation of coldness which I was afterwards to associate with the Daffodil affair.

  ‘But so far as I know,’ continued Julia, ‘no one thought there was anything sinister about it. The obvious explanation was that someone else on the terrace had ordered a large vodka and orange juice – one does find people in the Cayman Islands who might think that a suitable breakfast beverage – and the waiter had confused the orders.’

  ‘But surely,’ said Ragwort, ‘there must have been some kind of investigation to establish whether that had happened?’

  ‘Well no. As Selena has suggested, the chief concern of Stingham’s was to see, if at all possible, that there was no reference in the newspapers to the fact that Oliver Grynne had been drinking – you can imagine what the Scuttle would have made of it, for example. Well, Patrick had one or two quite influential friends in Georgetown, and he thought he could probably arrange for that aspect of the accident to be kept quiet. But that depended on the authorities assuming that it was quite normal for Grynne to have been drinking vodka. If they’d known that it wasn’t they’d have been bound to investigate, and it would have become public knowledge. So they all decided simply to say nothing about his being a teetotaller. Darkside, I need hardly say, was not involved in these discussions, but there didn’t seem much risk that he would think of volunteering that particular item of information to the authorities.’

  Selena divided the remainder of the wine equitably among our glasses.

  ‘It does occur to me,’ she said absent-mindedly, ‘that if one were going to attack someone while they were swimming, it might be rather sensible to ensure that they had consumed a large quantity of alcohol, especially if they weren’t used to it. No doubt I’m being fanciful.’

  ‘Extremely fanciful,’ said Ragwort. ‘But . . . how convenient for Gideon Darkside that Oliver Grynne should have died.’

  5

  EXTRACT FROM THE GUIDE TO COMFORTABLE TAX PLANNING

  Sark: Smallest of the Channel Islands, lying between Guernsey and Jersey. Closer geographically to the former, and comprised in the same Bailiwick, but originally colonized (in 1585) by 40 Jerseymen under the patronage of Helier de Carteret, Seigneur of St Ouen. Area: 1,348 acres. Population: 500. Capital: None to speak of – social and commercial activity centres on the Avenue, an unmade-up road running between the Bel Air Tavern and the Post Office and containing several souvenir and jewellery shops. Tractors are the only permitted form of motor transport; bicycles and horse-drawn carriages can be hired. Principal industries: Tourism and financial services. More company directorships per head than anywhere else in the world. Access: Regular boat service from Guernsey; for boat and hydrofoil services to Jersey and St Malo, enquire locally.

  Note 1: Avoid if prone to seasickness.

  A slender, fair-haired girl stood hesitating in the doorway of the Corkscrew, as if in surroundings unfamiliar to her, looking from one to another of the groups of lawyers gossiping at candlelit tables. Upon seeing us, she approached our table, and I saw that it was Lilian.

  She accepted with some demur the offer of a glass of wine. The purpose of her coming, it seemed, was to deliver to Julia a telex message received a few minutes earlier in 63 New Square. A colleague of Julia’s, knowing something of her ways, had looked for her next door in 62; Lilian, knowing something more, had volunteered to look for her in the Corkscrew.

  ‘It’s extremely kind of you,’ said Julia, ‘to take so much trouble. Does it seem to be urgent?’

  ‘It’s not actually marked “Urgent,”’ said Lilian, blushing slightly. ‘But – I couldn’t help reading the first couple of lines, and I thought you ought to see it right away. Because Mr Cantrip’s supposed to be in West London County Court tomorrow, and – and Henry’s going to be terribly cross.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Selena.

  TELEX M. CANTRIP TO J. LARWOOD TRANSMITTED SARK 6:15 P.M. MONDAY 30TH APRIL

  Yoo-hoo there, Larwood, guess who? Me again, unforeseenly Sark-stuck. Tell Henry hard cheese on West London County Court, they’ll have to make do with Ragwort.

  If Henry thinks I did it on purpose, you might point out that Sark isn’t exactly a major centre of exciting and sophisticated entertainment – just a flat-topped lump of rock in the middle of nowhere, with not much to do unless you’ve got a big thing about sea gulls. Gabrielle says it’s like the Garden of Eden, but there wasn’t much to do there either, was there? Except for eating apples.

  Anyway, the way I see it, it’s all Darkside’s fault. The plane to Guernsey made him feel sick and the boat to Sark made him feel sicker and the horse and carriage made him feel sickest of the lot. If Henry thinks it can’t take long to get anywhere on an island three miles by one, tell him to try doing it in a horse-drawn carriage sitting next to a chartered accountant who looks like a corpse with liver trouble and groans every time the horse starts to trot a bit.

  We had to amble along at about one mph, getting plenty of time to look at the butterflies and wildflowers and wave graciously at the passing peasantry. Passing, in view of our speed, was something the peasantry did pretty easily, including an old biddy wrapped up in black shawls just like the one in the Grand Hotel the other evening – don’t suppose it was the same one, though.

  What with the sun shining and the birds singing and so on, I wouldn’t actually have minded much about going slowly, except I was worried about Gabrielle being on her own somewhere with chaps from the Revenue lurking in the undergrowth.

  Philip Alexandre hangs out on the part of the island called Little Sark – almost a separate island, just joined up to the rest by a long thin bit called the Coupee, like a kind of bridge about a hundred yards long, with a three-hundred-foot drop on both sides and railings to stop you falling over. It’s just about wide enough for a carriage, though not with much room to spare, but they’re not allowed to take passengers across it, so we had to get out and walk.

  Even that took quite a lot longer than it might have done, because the chap driving the carriage thought this was the right time to fill us in on the local spookery and witchcraft statistics. He’s a boozy-looking character called Albert, who works for Philip Alexandre as a sort of general handyman, and he seems to think he’s got a patriotic duty to tell everyone there are more ghosts and witches per square foot on Little Sark than anywhere else in the Channel Islands, and more at the Hotel Alexandra than at the Sablonnerie down the road.

  On Halloween and nights like that, he says, the Devil used to ride across the Coupee in a big black coffin, and the witches used to fly over from Guernsey on their broomsticks and dance on the beach with no clothes on. He’s not sure if they still do it, but he thinks if they don’t, it’s because of television.

  Edward Malvoisin and Clemmie started ragging each other about it, with him saying that witches were all rot and her saying they weren’t and her betting him he wouldn’t dare walk across the Coupee at midnight and him betting her he would.

  Darkside came back from the dead enough to say we hadn’t come all this way at great trouble and expense, etc., to talk a lot of nonsense about witches. Ardmore said if we could get in touch with the ghost of the settlor and ask it what to do with the trust fund, that would solve all our problems. When Darkside worked out this was a joke he decided to feel sick again and not be well enough to go on for quite a long time.

  So that’s how we didn’t get to Philip Alexandre’s place until nearly midday. It’s really just a farmhouse, but he’s added a few extra bathrooms and a cocktail bar and calls it the Hotel Alexandra.

  The bar was looking a good bit more stylish than it would normally have done on account of having Gabrielle in it, sitting on a high stool and drinking champagne – it’s funny how seeing Gabrielle in a place
makes it feel all sort of Parisian. The chap behind the bar, doing a lot less for the decor, was Philip Alexandre himself – he’s a skinny old chap who looks as if he’s been pickled in walnut juice for about a hundred years, but quite genial when you get to know him. They were chatting away together in that funny kind of Frogspeak people talk here and didn’t seem to have been missing us at all.

  Plan A had been to have the board meeting and then a spot of lunch and be driven back in time to catch the 3:30 boat to Guernsey. I thought at first we might still manage it that way, as long as people didn’t talk too much at the board meeting, but that was before they told me that they had to get through 126 other board meetings as well as the Daffodil one.

  One two six, just in case you think I’ve mistyped it. That’s because Patrick and Gabrielle have set up Sark resident companies for 126 different clients and they all have to prove that this is where the board of directors take their decisions.

  Plan B was skipping lunch, proposed by Darkside and not finding a seconder.

  Plan C was to have lunch first, then the board meetings, and then drive back in time for the 5:30 boat to Guernsey. It worked pretty well, up to a point – I mean, it was a jolly good lunch.

  They didn’t need me for the first 126 board meetings, so I went and sat in the garden and read a book. There’s a stack of old novels in the dining room by a chap called John Oxenham, and I borrowed one called Perilous Lovers.

  It’s all about Sark in the old days, when there wasn’t anyone living here – just the witches flying over from Guernsey for the occasional orgy. The heroine’s called Claire of Belfontaine and she’s married to a frightful rotter who’s madly jealous about her and has her cast away on Sark without any clothes, absolutely not a stitch, but she makes herself a sort of skirt out of bracken. Bet you couldn’t do that.

  It’s a pity our book’s not about the old days when people did things like that – it would make it a lot easier to put in exciting bits. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it, and what I think we need is some sort of extra interest for Carruthers on the romantic side. I mean, it’s all right him fancying Eliane in a way, and marrying her after she turns out to be an heiress, because we want to have a happy ending. But the way I see it is that under all the suavity and daredevil charm, he’s a tremendously sensitive sort of chap who thinks pretty deeply about things, and I don’t see Eliane as the kind of bird who’s going to appreciate that side of him.

  So what I thought was that there ought to be some other bird that he’s got a tremendous thing about on a sort of spiritual level, and it can’t ever come to anything because she’s married or something, but deep down she’s the only person who really understands him. She’d be quite a lot older than him, but sort of ageless and a bit mysterious, like the Moaning Lizzie – not miserable, though, a frightfully good sport, and laughing a lot at things.

  Where was I? Oh yes, waiting to go on in my big scene as Counsel advising on the Daffodil problem. Which when it came didn’t exactly go like a breeze, because what I told them was that if they couldn’t exercise their discretion the way the settlor wanted them to, and they wouldn’t exercise it any other way, the descendants of the Palgrave chap were going to scoop the jackpot, so they’d better start finding out who they were.

  I knew they wouldn’t like it and they didn’t. They were still arguing the toss about it when someone noticed it was quarter to five and time we were on our way back to the harbour. So we looked round for Albert and the carriage and there they weren’t. He’d taken someone to catch the 3:30 boat and not been seen since – it turned out he’d stopped for a swift one at the Bel Air Tavern and forgotten to start again. I suppose we might still have made it to the harbour on time if we’d run all the way, but it wasn’t an idea that anyone seemed keen on.

  So here we are for the night, and no way of getting a plane to London before tomorrow evening. Like I said, absolutely not my fault and hard luck on West London County Court.

  Looking on the bright side, it means I can go on reading this book about Claire of Belfontaine. I’ve just got to the bit where the chap she really fancies gets cast away on Sark as well. Her husband’s fixed it all on purpose so that they’ll die in a state of sin – people had jolly funny ideas in the old days, didn’t they? – but they’ve decided to scupper him by being all chaste and noble and not getting up to anything. So I don’t really want to leave until I find out what happens.

  If I don’t make it back to London by tomorrow night, tell Henry the witches have got me. There’s a cottage here that used to belong to a bird called Rachel Alexandre, who was burned as a witch in 1600 and something – Philip’s frightfully proud of her. It’s got three bedrooms, and of course Gabrielle and Clemmie bagged two of them as soon as they knew we were staying overnight, so I thought I’d better grab the third with a view to keeping an eye on them. No sign of any chaps from the Revenue lurking in the bushes, though.

  Over and out – Cantrip

  ‘Poor Mr Cantrip,’ said Lilian, turning her wineglass between anxious fingers. ‘I hope he’ll be all right.’

  ‘I can see,’ said Ragwort, ‘no reason why he should not be. From the point of view of his own pleasure and convenience, he seems to have arranged things admirably. It is not his plans for tomorrow, for example, which are to be disrupted by an unexpected excursion to West London County Court. Why should he not be all right?’

  ‘I was in Miss Derwent’s office this morning,’ said Lilian. ‘To arrange about collecting my books – you know, the ones my uncle left me that Mr Cantrip was so kind about. The girls there think there’s something – I don’t know, something unlucky about this case that Mr Cantrip’s working on. It’s the same one Mr Grynne was dealing with last year when – when he died. They say it was awfully unexpected.’

  ‘No doubt it was,’ said Selena. ‘One could hardly expect his doctor to have diagnosed a tendency to accidental drowning.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Julia absent-mindedly, ‘if it happened to be Halloween, we might have worried about Cantrip being carried off by witches. The more so since he has comprehensively disregarded my advice to avoid girls, women, and crones – these repeated encounters of his with elderly ladies in black shawls would have, at that season, a most sinister aspect. Fortunately, however, it is some months away.’

  ‘But surely,’ said Ragwort, with an expression of some surprise, ‘it is not only at Halloween that the powers of darkness are particularly to be feared? There is at least one other occasion in the year when the witches of Europe climb on their broomsticks and fly across the mountains to gather in their accustomed meeting places. Have you not observed the date and its significance?’

  ‘It’s the thirtieth of April,’ said Selena. ‘Which means that the courts begin sitting again tomorrow.’

  ‘It is indeed the thirtieth of April,’ said Ragwort. ‘Which means that tonight is Walpurgis Night.’

  Nurtured as I have been in a sceptical tradition, I am disinclined to believe in witchcraft. No other reason having occurred to me for Cantrip to remain longer in the Channel Islands, I was surprised, on encountering my friends in the coffeehouse on the following morning, to find Julia in possession of yet a further telex from him.

  TELEX CANTRIP TO LARWOOD TRANSMITTED SARK 8.00 A.M. TUESDAY 1ST MAY

  Phew – if Henry complains about being one suave Chancery junior short of strength, tell him that after last night he’s jolly lucky it’s not permanent.

  Look here, Larwood, what I want to know is why birds nowadays aren’t like they used to be in the old days. Yielding is what birds were in the old days, and what I specially like about birds being yielding is that they can’t start being it till they’ve got something to yield to, viz they jolly well wait to be asked.

  You remember this book I told you about, the one where this bird and this chap are stuck on Sark with no clothes on being all chaste and noble? Well, there’s a bit where the chap feels tempted by his baser nature, and he goes striding off int
o the storm until he conquers it, and in some ways you can see it’s pretty sickening for him. On the other hand, when he isn’t being tempted by his baser nature, he doesn’t have to worry about the bird not bothering to conquer hers and dragging him off into the bracken and telling him to get on with it. That’s because it’s all happening in the old days, and you can’t help thinking that in some ways it must have been jolly restful.

  The thing that gets me, looking back on last night, is that there was actually a stage when I was quite looking forward to getting a solid eight hours of health-giving zizz. Which just goes to show how right all those chaps are who say what a waste of time it is expecting things to turn out the way you expect them to, because they never do.

  We’d all adjourned to the bar for a swift one after dinner, but Gabrielle drank hers quite fast and said she felt like an early night. She’d been a bit edgy all evening, because on the way over from the cottage before dinner she’d thought she’d spotted someone prowling about at the far end of the garden. She wasn’t sure – she’d only seen him for a second or two and it was getting dark – and she pretended it didn’t worry her, but I could see it did.

  I wouldn’t have let her walk back on her own, even if there hadn’t been anyone prowling. It’s not far from the farmhouse to the cottage, but it was pretty dark and a bit spooky. The weather had changed while we were having dinner and the moon kept getting covered up with clouds and the wind was making a sort of wailing noise in the telegraph wires.

  So I said I’d quite like to turn in early as well, and then Clemmie said she would, too, and we all walked back to the cottage together. We left Patrick Ardmore and Edward Malvoisin drinking whiskey and playing darts, and Darkside drinking barley water and looking disapproving.

  Right then – at ten-thirty there I am respectably tucked up in bed, just meaning to read another chapter of this book before I go to sleep, when there’s a knock on the door and Clemmie waltzes in, wearing a pink thing with a lot of frills and saying ‘Well, how about it?’ or words to the like effect.