The Sirens Sang of Murder

by Sarah Caudwell

  So I decided what I’d better do was follow him, discreetly and at a longish distance, and find out what he was up to. I gave him a minute or so to get ahead of me and then I slid out of the office and started after him – he was about fifty yards away making for the Coupee.

  The way he behaved when he got there was pretty suspicious, if you ask me. There were two chaps with a tractor trying to unblock the entrance, and someone with nothing to be shifty about would have gone straight up and asked how long it would take or something like that. Wellieboots just stood looking at them from a distance for a bit, and then went and sat on a bench by the edge of the cliff and did an imitation of an innocent tourist admiring the view. So I went and sat on the bench on the opposite side and did an imitation of another innocent tourist.

  Bit of a waste of talent really, because there wasn’t much of an audience – just the two chaps trying to haul the carriage away and an old biddy in black nattering away with them like bosom pals. Same one I saw the day before, I suppose, unless there are lots of them in Sark. She must have been chatting them up with a view to hitching a lift – as soon as the entrance was cleared she nipped up on the tractor beside the driver and got driven straight across, riding shotgun.

  Wellieboots stopped pretending to look at the view and made off along the Coupee, with me following and being careful not to get too close. I don’t suppose he’d have recognized me, specially without a wig and gown – I’ve only been in front of him a couple of times in the Companies Court, asking for the usual compulsory order, and he didn’t give me the feeling I’d made a lasting impression – but I thought I’d better be on the safe side. Actually I needn’t have worried, because he never looked round once – just kept going all the way to the Avenue and down the hill to the harbour.

  There was a boat at the quayside with a long queue of people waiting to go on board. When Wellieboots joined on the end of it I was a bit baffled – I hadn’t exactly been thinking of leaving right away, without saying good-bye to Gabrielle or anything. Still, it seemed pretty wet to give up at that stage, and I’d got my briefcase with my pyjamas and toothbrush in it, and this jolly good book that I told you about and I was still in the middle of, so in the end I decided to go on board as well.

  It didn’t make much odds as far as I was concerned whether the boat was going to Jersey or Guernsey, and I thought I’d feel a bit of an ass if I asked the chap selling tickets, so I just kept quiet and gave him as much as he wanted. I got a seat a good bit away from old Wellieboots, next to a couple of characters talking about corpses. They started with one who’d been brought in that morning on a fishing boat and went on to all the drownings and shipwrecks off Sark in the past four hundred years or so – cheerful sort of subject when you’re putting out to sea.

  After two or three hours we got near to some land again, but it didn’t look much like Jersey. It didn’t look much like Guernsey either. There was a huge great wall, tremendously historic-looking, with long black roofs like witches’ hats sticking up at the back of it, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where it was.

  If you’re an ace investigator hot on the trail of a villainous High Court judge it’s a good thing to know what town you’re in, so I nipped off the boat as fast as I could to find out where we were. The first thing I spotted was that everyone was talking Frogspeak, so putting two and two together I deduced we were probably in France.

  I felt a bit miffed at first. I’ve nothing against France, except for it being full of foreigners, but it wasn’t where I’d have expected old Wellieboots to go if he wanted to get the goods on my clients. I started thinking poor old Catseyes Cantrip might be on a wildgoose chase. Still, having got this far I was blowed if I was giving up right away, so when he got ashore I started tailing him again.

  He went through a big gate in the historic-looking wall into a square with four or five cafés in it – you know the kind they have in France, tables on the pavement with sort of conservatories over them. He went and sat down in one of them, skulking in a corner pretending to read a newspaper, and I went and skulked in a corner in the one opposite. I was getting jolly hungry by this time, so I ordered a few ham pancakes and hoped he wouldn’t move on before I got a chance to eat them.

  He kept squinting at the café next door to the one I was in, as if he was watching for someone to come out of it. So I kept an eye on it as well, to see if I could spot who he was watching out for. When I saw who it was I simply couldn’t believe it. You won’t either, because it was Gabrielle.

  Which absolutely just wasn’t possible. Wellieboots and I had been across the Coupee as soon as it was open and gone straight down to the harbour and got the first boat going, so there was no way anyone could have got to France any faster than we did. But there she was.

  ‘How very extraordinary,’ said Julia, pausing in bewilderment from her reading of the telex. ‘How on earth can she have done it?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Perhaps she flew over on her broomstick.’

  In truth, however, the reappearance at this juncture of the Contessa in the Place Chateaubriand in St Malo was a matter of no greater astonishment to me than I can suppose it will be, dear reader, to yourself.

  She didn’t look as if she was doing anything frightfully secret or mysterious – she just went into the bank next door for a minute or two and then came back and sat down and started ordering lunch.

  I couldn’t go over and say hello and ask how she’d got there, because of not wanting to be spotted by Wellieboots. It was obvious by this time that she was the one he was out to get the goods on, and of course I jolly well wasn’t going to let him, but the way I saw it was that my best chance of foiling him was to let him go on thinking she was all alone and at his mercy, little knowing he’d got Catseyes Cantrip to reckon with.

  That meant I couldn’t let Gabrielle spot me either, in case she waved at me or something and blew my cover. It seemed a pity to be sitting eating lunch in the same square and not being able to talk to her, but looking on the bright side it was still a lot better than doing a possession action in West London County Court. Hope that turned out all right, by the way.

  To get to the bank I’d have had to walk straight past her, so I had to get the waiter to change me some money into francs. He gave me about half the going rate of exchange and looked at me as if I was loopy. He thought I was even loopier when I asked for my bill before I’d finished eating, but I didn’t want to get caught on the hop if anything happened suddenly.

  I nearly did, all the same. I was taking more notice of Gabrielle than old Wellieboots, like anyone would with any sense, and she’d only just started making signals for her bill when I looked round and saw him heading for the gateway. So quick as a flash I was up and after him.

  What happened next was pretty sinister. He pootled along to a car park a few hundred yards from the gate, went over to an oldish blue Renault, and climbed into the driving seat, cool as a cucumber. Then he just sat there, obviously waiting for Gabrielle to come along and drive off in one of the other cars.

  Which to the razor-sharp intellect of the ace investigator meant just one thing – viz that he hadn’t only known where she was going to be and what she was going to be doing, but he’d known it enough in advance to fix up to have a car waiting for him in the same place as hers. Well, have a think about ways he could have found all that out, and if you can think of one that isn’t jolly sinister I’ll buy the next three bottles of wine in the Corkscrew.

  Did I ever tell you about an old mate of mine at Cambridge who was an absolute whiz with locks? He wasn’t all that hot on land law, though, and he gave me some quite useful tips in exchange for helping with his essays. One of the things I used to practise on was the boot of a Renault – in top form I could do it in ninety seconds flat, just with an ordinary penknife like one’s always got in one’s pocket. And the car Wellieboots was sitting in was exactly the same model.

  It seemed sort of meant, somehow. I walked on a bit, so as not to b
e coming from the same direction he was expecting Gabrielle from, and then I looped back, doing an imitation of a suave young English milord strolling casually through a car park. When I got to the Renault I ducked down at the back of it and got to work – there was a wall behind me, and not a lot of people about, so I’d have been unlucky to get spotted.

  It took me just under two minutes, which wasn’t bad considering I was out of practice. I’d just finished when I saw Gabrielle walking across the car park towards a rather snazzy Mercedes. Wellieboots must have seen her, too, because he started his engine. So I opened the boot and nipped in.

  It was one of those things that seem like a good idea at the time and a slightly less good idea about a minute later, but by that time we were moving quite fast.

  Don’t let’s have a bit in our book where Carruthers gets stuck in the boot of a car for five hours. I suppose there are some chaps who write books who could go on for pages about it and make it sound jolly exciting, but I just don’t see how they do it. You can forget describing the scenery for a start, because there isn’t any.

  It was the most boring five hours I’ve ever spent, even counting that time you got me to see three Shakespeare plays one after another in the same day. It was a lot more uncomfortable as well, because the only way there was room for me was with my knees scrunched up against my chin and my head at right angles to my spine, and not able to move anything more than about an inch. I couldn’t even risk dropping off to sleep, because I’d got my handkerchief looped round the door handle and I had to keep hold of both ends of it to keep the door sort of shut but not shut at the same time – I’d never tried opening the boot of a Renault from the inside, and I thought it would be a bad time to find out I couldn’t.

  It felt as if we were driving mostly on motorway, and by the time we stopped I suppose we must have gone about two hundred and fifty miles. I was practically past caring whether anyone spotted me climbing out, but I made myself count to sixty to give Wellieboots time to get clear. Then I opened the door a bit and had a squint round.

  It was beginning to get dark, and I was in a big garden with walls round it at the back of a largish house. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so I crawled out. I thought for a bit that I was never going to be able to stand up straight again, but I managed it in the end. Then I looked round and there was the Mercedes, parked a few yards away.

  When I got outside into the street I could see the town we were in was the kind of place Gabrielle would be keen on – tremendously historic-looking, with a big castle and lots of cobblestones, and a covered market like you see in old towns in the country. The place we were parked at the back of looked like a rather grand sort of hunting lodge, but when I got round to the front it turned out to be a hotel, called after some bird called Blanche.

  It seemed like a pretty fair bet that Gabrielle and Wellieboots would both be having dinner there, so I pootled in and asked for a table.

  The headwaiter gave me a slightly cross-eyed sort of look, as if I wasn’t quite as swanny as he’d have liked me to be – that’s Frogspeak for having a clean shirt on and a crease in your trousers and generally not looking as if you’d spent the past five hours in the boot of a Renault. Still, he gave me a table all right – tucked away in a corner where no one would notice me, which was fine as far as I was concerned.

  He can’t have thought Wellieboots was all that swanny either – he was at a table in another darkish corner, with a boar’s head with big tusks mounted on the wall behind him. There wasn’t a lot of difference between them, but the boar was friendlier-looking.

  It was quite a while before Gabrielle came in, and when she did she was with a tall dark chap who I suppose you’d say was frightfully good-looking – not all that young, though, and probably putting on weight a bit if he hadn’t had his clothes cut so as to hide it. I couldn’t think to begin with how he came into the picture, but then I remembered her saying she was going to meet her husband somewhere on the way back from the Channel Islands. So obviously that’s who it was.

  The headwaiter perked up like anything, because Gabrielle was looking tremendously swanny, and took them to a table outside on the terrace, with lots of flowers and candles and things. Her husband must have fixed it up in advance to make it all sort of romantic. You’d have thought he hadn’t seen her for months – he kept kissing her hand and looking into her eyes and generally being pretty soppy – but I suppose foreigners always carry on like that, specially Italians.

  I could see that Gabrielle was in a bit of a fizz, though. She kept taking things out of her handbag and putting them down all over the place, as if there was something that ought to be there and wasn’t – the sort of thing you’re always doing but she usually isn’t – with a lot of hand-waving, and all the waiters gathering round trying to look helpful and sympathetic. I thought she must have lost her chequebook or her credit cards or something, but one of the waiters eventually got round to serving me and, according to him, it was her pen. I still didn’t think it was like her to make such a fuss, but I suppose it was the one she told me about that was a present from her husband, and she was in a flap in case he was miffed about it.

  ‘Or do you suggest,’ said Selena, regarding me with an expression not wholly sceptical and again refilling my teacup, ‘that it was because she remembered where she might have lost it?’

  ‘But if she lost it,’ said Julia, ‘in such dramatic circumstances as that would seem to imply, then surely she would have noticed long before she reached – where do we think all this happened?’

  ‘It sounds to me,’ said Ragwort, evidently making an unsuccessful effort to resist the sin of envy, ‘remarkably like Dourdan. It’s a charming little town between Paris and Chartres and during the Middle Ages was a favourite residence of the French royal family. There is an admirable hotel there named after Blanche of Castile, the mother, as of course you know, of the sainted Louis IX.’

  I don’t say there’s any meal that I’d willingly go five hours in the boot of a Renault for, because actually there isn’t, but if there was, the one I had on Tuesday evening would probably be it. They gave me pancakes with bits of lobster in them and a sort of rabbit stew cooked with wine, and I started thinking that being an ace investigator wasn’t too bad after all.

  There didn’t seem much risk of anyone going any further that night, so I nipped out to the reception desk and booked a room and got them to fix up a hired car for the next morning. I had to wave a lot of plastic of course – you can say what you like about credit cards leading people into debt, but they’re jolly useful when you haven’t got any money.

  I wondered if I ought to leave a note for Gabrielle to warn her what was going on, but I thought there was too much risk of Wellieboots intercepting it. So I lurked around long enough to make sure she and her husband went upstairs before he did, in case he’d got any ideas about searching their room, and then I went to bed.

  I couldn’t manage to get my paws on a telex machine, and if Henry says I ought to have rung Chambers first thing in the morning to say where I was, tell him that’s exactly the sort of fat-headed suggestion I’d expect him to make. Henry’s idea of first thing in the morning is nine-thirty, which is ten-thirty in France, and by then we’d all been on the road for more than an hour, heading for the south.

  I was in a rather nifty little Peugeot, with the Mercedes ahead of me and Wellieboots tagging along behind in the Renault. I’d had this tremendously subtle idea of staying in front of him, so that he wouldn’t be suspicious about always seeing me in his rear-view mirror. It meant he kept seeing me ahead of him of course, but you wouldn’t think of someone following you from the front, would you?

  We were driving through one of those bits of France where the hills have vines growing all over them and the names on the signposts make you feel as if you’re driving through the wine list in a rather high-class restaurant. It makes you start thinking about lunch a lot sooner than you normally would – by twelve I was pretty pe
ckish and by one I was simply ravenous. The signposts started featuring a town called Beaune, which somehow sounded as if it might have some nice restaurants, and I hoped we might be going there, but the Mercedes went straight past the turning. It stopped a bit further on, though, at a place with vineyards all round it and a roof made of pink tiles, which called itself the auberge de something or other.

  It would have been a chance to have a quick word with Gabrielle before Wellieboots turned up, and afterwards I wished I’d taken it, but her husband still looked as if he was being a bit soppy, and I felt as if I’d sort of be barging in on a two’s-company situation. So I kept out of sight until they’d gone into the courtyard at the back, where the restaurant was. Then I went and sat in the bar, which looked out on the road, to watch for old Wellieboots.

  The barman brought me the menu and a glass of blackcurrant juice – he was a youngish chap, slightly depressed-looking, as if he’d got problems or toothache or something – and reading the menu made me even hungrier. There was still no sign of old Wellie-boots, and I couldn’t think what had happened to him – the Mercedes was parked in full view of the road, and not exactly what you’d call inconspicuous, so he’d have had to be pretty dim to miss it.

  After a bit an oldish chap came along who seemed to be the owner and gave me some more blackcurrant juice and asked me what I’d like to eat. He was a red-faced, twinkly sort of chap, the kind you’d get to dress up in a red cloak and white whiskers for a Christmas party. Which would be a mistake, because if ever there was a chap who’d take any chance he got to chisel a starving two-year-old out of its last lollipop, it was this twinkly chap.

  What gets me is that the two-faced old skulduggerer was so tremendously hospitable, saying what a privilege it was to have an English visitor and being sympathetic about my problems with lunch – viz whether to have the duck or the cassoulet with goose and how to make sure I’d got room for marrons glacé at the end.