The Sirens Sang of Murder

by Sarah Caudwell

  ‘I questioned him,’ I said rather coldly, ‘with as much rigour as the circumstances permitted.’

  ‘Oh yes? All right then, what does he say he was doing that night in Sark when poor old Edward Malvoisin got pushed off the cliff?’

  ‘He told me,’ I said with some reluctance, though I did not regard this part of the judge’s narrative as being confidential, ‘that he spent the night in one of the outbuildings on Philippe Alexandre’s farm and saw you all retire for the night to the Witch’s Cottage. After that he slept until daybreak.’

  Cantrip’s hooting merriment echoed round the Salon Rose.

  I spent, I confess, a somewhat troubled night. Though I myself had every confidence that Sir Arthur Welladay had told me the truth, I had been obliged to admit that his account of his movements on the previous Monday night did not, strictly speaking, provide him with what is termed an alibi. If he had in fact stayed awake rather longer than he had claimed – long enough, that is to say, to observe the departure from the farmhouse of Edward Malvoisin, to follow the unfortunate advocate to the Coupee, and there to encompass his death – it would indeed have been beyond the limits of reasonable truthfulness to give me a wholly accurate account.

  I did not for a moment believe that anything of the kind had occurred. On the other hand, if I were in error, I could not disguise from myself that the arrangement I had made would require my young friend to travel back to London in inescapable proximity to a murderer. Such thoughts conduce ill to sleep.

  His belief in Sir Arthur Welladay’s homicidal inclinations had not at all deterred Cantrip from giving effect to the arrangement. On the contrary, he had embraced it, I suspect, with far greater enthusiasm than he would have done if I had persuaded him of the judge’s innocence. His spirits, when on the following morning we set out for Nice airport – I could do no less than accompany him so far – were high to the point of effervescence; mine were weighed down by doubt and apprehension.

  ‘Cantrip,’ I said, when we had been driving for some ten minutes along the Middle Corniche, ‘you know that I would not for the world expose you to any personal danger.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, old thing,’ said Cantrip cheerfully. ‘I mean, you didn’t when you set the thing up, so why start now? I shouldn’t think old Wellieboots is loopy enough to stick a knife in my ribs in the middle of a planeful of passengers.’

  ‘I’m sure he isn’t,’ I said. ‘I mean, I am sure that he is perfectly well balanced and law-abiding. But at the same time – ’

  ‘Anyway, if he does, that’ll jolly well prove he’s as nutty as a fruitcake and ought to be put away somewhere he can’t do any harm – House of Lords or somewhere. So at least he’ll stop bothering Gabrielle. I say, you’ll be seeing Gabrielle, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We are lunching together on Monday.’

  ‘You’ll explain why I’ve left Monte Carlo, won’t you? I wouldn’t want her to think I’d just gone off and left her in the lurch.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And the other thing you might do is give something to that rather jolly chambermaid for me. I know she talked a lot of rot about me being keen on Gabrielle, which was all bilge, of course, but she was right about me winning at the Casino, so I sort of feel she ought to get a slice of the winnings. If I give you a tenner when we get to the airport, will you pass it on to her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, certainly.’ His requests fell on my ear with a dismally testamentary ring.

  Having delivered the motorcar to a representative of the company from which he had hired it, we joined the line of prospective travellers waiting for boarding cards. I saw, a few places ahead of us, the tall figure of the judge. He glanced briefly towards us as he strode away towards the departure gate, and for the first time that morning I perceived in my young friend’s eyes a flicker of apprehension.

  ‘My dear Cantrip,’ I said, ‘perhaps after all it would be better not to take this flight.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot, old thing,’ said Cantrip. ‘If I don’t go on this one, Wellieboots won’t either, and we’ll be back at square one.’

  ‘But if you really think – ’

  ‘I’m not worried about him trying to bump me off. It’s just that I’d forgotten how he looks at you, like one of those things that turn people to stone – you know, an obelisk.’

  He meant, I suppose, a basilisk, but I had not the heart to dispute with the poor boy.

  It consoled me but little to reflect, during my return journey to Monte Carlo, that if he were now travelling in the company of a murderer I would not myself be lunching with one in two days’ time. Admittedly, if Gabrielle was not Welladay’s daughter – and it would hardly be logical to accept his evidence on all other issues and reject it on that – she was not a descendant of Sir Walter Palgrave and accordingly not a potential beneficiary of the Daffodil fund. I had believed from the outset, however, and saw no reason now to alter my opinion, that so far as motive was concerned the professional advisers to the settlement were as worthy of suspicion as the beneficiaries. And what of Gabrielle’s fountain pen? All those who had been in her company on Sark and might have found an opportunity to steal it seemed now to be excluded from suspicion. It appeared then that she herself must have dropped it: for her to have done so by any innocent accident at the very place where Malvoisin had fallen would surely be . . . a most remarkable coincidence.

  A telephone call on Saturday afternoon assured me of Cantrip’s safe arrival in London, unmolested by any homicidal attention from Mr Justice Welladay. I was sufficiently relieved to be able to spend the remainder of the weekend in almost unalloyed enjoyment of the pleasures of the Mediterranean. On the Monday morning, however, I woke with a sense of apprehension, which I realized after a few moments was attributable to the prospect of lunching with the Contessa.

  Shortly after breakfast I encountered, for the first time since Cantrip’s departure, the gipsy-eyed chambermaid, and made haste to honour my undertaking to give her a suitable share of his winnings.

  ‘I do wish,’ I said, ‘that you would tell me how you knew of my friend’s attachment to an auburn-haired lady who wears Houbigant’s Raffiné.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with a teasing smile, ‘don’t you wish I would tell you how I knew he would win at the Casino?’

  ‘No, mademoiselle, I don’t think I need to ask you that. I would rather suppose that you tell all visitors of a certain type that they will be lucky at the Casino. If they are not, they will hardly venture to reproach you. If they are, they will think it just to give you a share of their winnings. Inexperienced as I am in the ways of the world, I can guess so much of the art of prophecy.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the girl, ‘I am afraid you are a very cynical person, Professor. Well, if you can guess my secrets so easily, I do not see why I should tell you any more.’

  ‘Mademoiselle, I beg you,’ I said. ‘Take pity on the curiosity of a poor harmless Scholar.’

  She could not at once be persuaded to relinquish the pleasure of teasing; but she was a good-natured girl at heart, and well disposed to me on account of Cantrip’s present.

  ‘Well, Professor, it is very simple after all – I am surprised that you could not guess. When one finds three pretty auburn hairs on the jacket of someone’s pyjamas and it still smells just a little of Raffiné, it is not so difficult to tell his fortune.’

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ I said, ‘are you quite sure about the brand of perfume? Could you have made a mistake?’

  ‘I am from Grasse, Professor. I do not make mistakes about perfume.’

  I left in excellent spirits for my lunch with the Contessa, knowing that whatever her failings she had not murdered Edward Malvoisin.

  She had suggested a restaurant in the Condamine, at the junction between the Rue de Millo and the Rue Terrazani, within five minutes’ walk both of my hotel and of her own office. Its Provençal cooking and an admirable wine list are mentione
d with approval in The Guide to Comfortable Tax Planning.

  Though she seemed to me to have a little less sparkle in her large eyes than when I had last seen her, she was nonetheless charming company. Having considered the menu with the care it deserved and ordered a bottle of pale pink Provençal wine, we somehow fell to exchanging small items of harmless scandal – on her side of those residents of Monaco sufficiently noted for their wealth or other distinction to be of interest to me, on mine of various friends and colleagues whose names were known to her from her professional reading. She seemed to feel that she had the best of the bargain.

  ‘I am afraid,’ she said sadly, ‘that Monte Carlo gossip is not so interesting as the gossip of Oxford and London. It is a very small place, you see – one is always meeting the same people and hearing the same stories. And always about how much money they have spent – how much on the new yacht, how much on the new mistress, how much on the new Picasso. It is so parochial, I sometimes think I shall suffocate – I have to walk across the border to Roquebrune just to feel that I can breathe.’

  ‘But, Gabrielle,’ I said, ‘your skills are of an international nature, and the Edelweiss Bank has offices all over the world. Could you not arrange to be transferred to somewhere more congenial?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Perhaps it could be arranged. But Giovanni feels at home here, you see – he would not like to move.’

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘your work provides you with opportunities to travel.’

  ‘Not so many as you would think – with the telephone and the telex and the tele-this and the tele-that, it is hardly possible nowadays to find an excuse to leave one’s office. Oh, all this technology, it’s taken the fun out of everything. I travel in connection with the Daffodil Settlement, as you know, but that is rather exceptional – oh, my darling Daffodil, what should I do without you? I should go nowhere and meet no one.’

  ‘You cannot meet many new friends in connection with that. I gather that all those connected with it have known one another for many years.’

  ‘Yes, of course that is true, but sometimes one makes new friends. This time there was Michael.’

  I recalled my promise to explain to her the full reasons for Cantrip’s departure, making it clear that he had not heartlessly abandoned her to the persecutions of Mr Justice Welladay.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Gabrielle, the sparkle returning to her eyes, ‘I know he would not do that. Wasn’t it wonderful how he followed me all the way across France to protect me from his Mr Justice Wellieboots? Of course he is quite mad.’

  Since the remark seemed intended in a complimentary spirit, it did not seem to be incumbent on me to offer any defence of Cantrip’s sanity. I contented myself with remarking that I myself was very fond of the boy, but thought him perhaps a trifle lacking in discretion.

  ‘Discretion?’ Her face dissolved into a charming arrangement of upward curves. ‘Oh, I am afraid you are right, he has very little discretion. Do you perhaps know a friend of mine, Julia Larwood, a tax lawyer in London?’ I acknowledged that I did. ‘Well, the first time I saw Michael he was with Edward Malvoisin in the Grand Hotel in St Helier – they did not know I was there, I was wearing my old-lady clothes – and he was talking about poor Julia, the most personal things, quite at the top of his voice. And he meant it so nicely, because he wanted to show Edward how passionate she was and how fond of men. But I sat behind my potted palm tree and remembered that Julia had been to great trouble to make Edward think she was not at all passionate and not at all fond of men. Poor Edward, sometimes with women he could be a little bit of a nuisance. So I knew at once that Michael was not at all discreet.’

  ‘He is, of course, very young,’ I said. ‘Naive and lacking in experience of the realities of life. He has not been reared in that sceptical tradition which teaches one to doubt whether things are always what they seem. He could not otherwise have been deceived by thick stockings and a black shawl into thinking that a beautiful young woman was an aged crone.’ She smiled and refilled my glass in recognition of the compliment. ‘And to take another example – he is probably unfamiliar with the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Contessa thoughtfully, and for several minutes devoted her attention to the gobletful of fruit and multicoloured ice cream which the waitress had just placed in front of her. I in turn kept myself occupied with cheese and biscuits, thinking it tactful to remain silent until she spoke again.

  ‘I should like you to understand,’ she said at last, ‘that I am truly very fond of my husband. I would not hurt his feelings for anything in the world. But one needs, you understand, a little variety, a little amusement. Giovanni would not understand – he would be upset. So you see, discretion is important to me.’

  ‘Yes, I quite understand. And knowing that Cantrip did not possess that quality, you made a plan with Clementine for him to spend the night with you but be under the impression that he had spent it with her. Gabrielle, I should not like you to think me censorious, but do you not feel that that was just a little heartless?’

  ‘Oh dear, Hilary, do you think so? We thought it was such a nice idea – and I knew that Clementine was very discreet. At least – I thought so.’

  I hastened to reassure her that my only source of information was Cantrip himself, and that he was still under the firm impression that his companion that night had been Clementine.

  ‘But then – how did you know?’

  ‘My dear Gabrielle, for the Scholar the reasoning was very simple. When one finds that two manuscripts have a number of curious features in common, one is disposed to conclude that one is a copy of the other or that they are copies of the same original. A liaison, however brief, conducted in complete silence and total darkness can hardly be considered usual – I could not fail to be reminded of the scheme by which Helena secured the consummation of her marriage to the Count de Roussillon.’ I thought it unnecessary, and perhaps indelicate, to make any mention of the chambermaid.

  ‘Once I learnt of your connection with Sark, I saw how easy it would have been for you to make the necessary arrangements – to persuade Albert to desert his post, so that you were all obliged to stay overnight, and to engineer a convenient light failure.’

  ‘Well, that is very clever of you, Hilary. Clementine owes me a bottle of champagne – she bet me that Michael would find out somehow. Of course, if he had, I would have asked him not to tell anyone, and I think that really he would not have done, but it is much better that he does not know at all. You won’t tell him, will you? I think it might upset him somehow – I am much older than he is, you know – I think he looks on me as a sort of favourite aunt.’

  ‘It does not seem to me,’ I said, ‘that he regards you in quite that light. But I agree that it is better for him not to know the truth.’

  We ordered coffee, content with the understanding between us, but Gabrielle had no chance to drink it. A neatly dressed girl, who proved to be her secretary, arrived with news of a telex message from Clementine convening an urgent meeting of the Daffodil advisers at the Grand Hotel in St Helier at nine o’clock on the following morning. There had been, it seemed, a further development.

  ‘Hilary, I am very sorry – I must leave you. I know we have not talked at all about your research, but if I am flying to Jersey tonight I have so many things to arrange before I leave. Oh, poor Giovanni, he will be so upset at me going away again so soon. Please, stay and finish your coffee – I will leave a cheque with you to cover the bill. No, no, I insist – you are my guest.’

  It happened to be the last cheque in her chequebook. She did not trouble, having signed it, to detach it from its counterfoil but left the whole chequebook lying on the table beside me. I have wondered since whether in some recess of her unconscious mind she remembered and intended me to learn the secret that it contained. At the time, however, though it struck me as a piece of uncharacteristic carelessness, I thought it of no consequence. After settli
ng the account for our meal I put away the little book of counterfoils with the intention of at some convenient time returning it to her.

  It occurred to me after a few minutes that a similar summons from Clementine might be awaiting me at my hotel. I accordingly returned there in some haste, but found no message from her. With a curious sense of restlessness and unease, I walked back to the corner of the harbour and took the ascenseur publique to the Exotic Gardens. Any hope, however, of being soothed by the beauties of nature was doomed to disappointment. The grotesque and distorted shapes of the huge cacti imitated all too well the confusion of my mind concerning the death of Edward Malvoisin.

  I could find no way of construing the facts known to me that did not lead to some absurd and irrational conclusion. Every theory that I proposed to myself, whether fanciful or commonplace, left some vital element in the problem mysterious and unaccounted for: Gabrielle’s conviction, long before Sir Arthur Welladay appeared on the scene, that someone was watching her at Daffodil meetings; the finding of her pen on the Coupee; above all, perhaps, the part played in the affair by the woman in white – the formless, faceless figure who had appeared from the darkness on Walpurgis Night within a few yards of the place where Malvoisin had met his death.

  It was not until late that evening, after dining at my hotel, that I recalled being in possession of Gabrielle’s chequebook.

  There are many, I dare say, who would have thought it pointless, perhaps even improper, to subject such an item to any careful scrutiny; but it is not in the nature of the Scholar to neglect the study of any documentary evidence that comes to hand, however unrewarding the task may at first sight appear. It was almost by instinct that I read through the counterfoils, noting with idle interest how clear a record they provided of Gabrielle’s movements in the Channel Islands.

  The penultimate entry related to a withdrawal on 1st May from a bank in St Malo. When I saw it my blood seemed to turn to ice.