“In steering the difficult course between the Scylla of negligence and the Charybdis of conspiracy,” said the chairman, “it is always prudent to obtain the advice of Counsel. I think we’d all agree about that.” The speakers, all members of the Revenue Bar, nodded their approval of this satisfactory conclusion. “I hope that answers your question, Mr. — Mr. Darkside, isn’t it?”
I looked round in time to identify the questioner, who was shaking his head in manifest dissatisfaction. Cantrip had not wronged Gideon Darkside in suggesting that he was of cadaverous aspect, for the paucity of the flesh covering his long bones had little in common with the muscular leanness of health; his thinning black hair lay lank across his skull, and his skin had the pallor of a fish which has been dead too long to make wholesome eating.
Lunch was preceded by what were termed cocktails. I contrived when these were served to be within a few paces of the accountant and to receive my glass of sherry at the same time that he accepted a grapefruit juice. I had thought that some trifling accident with my glass, not involving the sacrifice of an excessive amount of sherry, would provide a natural pretext to engage him in conversation; but before I could execute such a manoeuvre he moved briskly away, with the object, as it proved, of talking to Patrick Ardmore. The Irishman greeted him with what looked more like resignation than enthusiasm.
“Glad you’re here,” said the accountant. “Wanted a word with you.”
“Of course, Gideon, by all means,” said the Irishman rather wearily.
The two men found seats at a small occasional table some distance removed from the general throng. Though they somewhat lowered their voices, I was able, by appearing engrossed in my lecture notes, to remain within earshot of their conversation.
“Look, Patrick, I want you to tell me what’s been going on.”
“Certainly, Gideon, by all means. In what connection, precisely?”
“This business of Edward Malvoisin of course. What’s happening about the inquest?”
“The inquest is on Saturday, but I understand that the Guernsey CID have already made their report to the Seneschal. They see no reason to doubt that his death was accidental.”
“And doesn’t anyone want to know what he was doing wandering about on the Coupee in the middle of the night?”
“The notion seems to have got about,” said Ardmore with pellucid innocence, “that he probably had a business appointment of some kind — something he didn’t want the rest of us to know about.”
“A business meeting? At midnight? How did anyone get a damn-fool idea like that?”
“Advisers on financial planning are in a fiercely competitive business these days, as of course you know, Gideon. If a high-net-worth individual wants advice on his tax affairs in the middle of a rainy night on Sark, then you have to be there, don’t you, or risk losing the client?”
“I never heard such a load of poppycock.”
“Or her tax affairs,” added Ardmore, with a sidelong glance and a world of innuendo.
“Oh, I see, they think he was off to see some woman. Well, that makes more sense, I suppose, specially in Malvoisin’s case. And how do they think he came to go over the edge?”
“The CID don’t think there’s any great mystery about that after all. At about midnight on Monday poor old Albert was driving his horse and carriage along the Coupee, drunk as a lord and with some idea that the Devil was after him, and you’ve seen for yourself that there’s not much leeway. If Edward was there and trying to get out of the way…” The Irishman spread his hands in a gesture designed to convey the sequel.
“Is that what the authorities think?”
“It’s the obvious explanation. There’s no question of Albert being charged with anything, of course — he’s a Sark man and very well liked, and he didn’t mean to do any harm to anyone. Well, Gideon, I think that’s all I can tell you.”
Ardmore looked at his watch, drained his glass, and began to rise, but the accountant stretched out a hand as if to restrain him.
“Just a minute, Patrick — what have you done about the pen?”
“The pen?” said Patrick Ardmore, with almost convincing perplexity, and then, at an exclamation of impatience from Darkside, “Oh — that pen. I’ll be returning it, of course, as soon as I’ve got someone going over to Monte Carlo — I wouldn’t like to trust it to the post. My dear man, you weren’t thinking I was going to steal it, were you?”
“Of course not — stop pretending to misunderstand me. I think you ought to have told someone about it — someone in authority.”
“You mean the Seneschal? My dear Gideon, the Seneschal’s a busy man with many responsibilities — why would I go troubling him about a little item of lost property that I can return to the owner myself without any difficulty?”
“I’d like to know how she came to drop it there,” said Darkside, with a sort of sullen malice.
“Would you? What a thirst you must have, to be sure, for useless information.”
“And when.”
“On the way across or on the way back, if she went back before us. I don’t understand you, Gideon. What is it you want? To make people think there’s something to investigate when they’re satisfied there isn’t? Policemen seconded from London and crime reporters from the national press, all wanting the exact details of why we were on Sark and what we were talking about? I’d have thought you’d be the last person to want that, in view of what we were discussing the other evening.”
“Well,” said the accountant sulkily, “if you’re not going to say anything, then I won’t either. But it’s your decision, and I accept no responsibility for it.”
“Oh, I quite understand that,” said the Irishman. “You really must excuse me, Gideon. There are some people I’ve promised to see at lunch.”
I had been invited to lunch with the chairman and speakers, at a table where both wine and conversation were expected to flow more freely than among the paying participants. I fear, however, that I repaid the courtesy but poorly, for my mind was too much preoccupied with the conversation I had just heard to allow me to contribute much by way of gossip or argument.
Julia, I noticed, seemed now in more cheerful spirits. Either the pleasure of the encounter with Ardmore or the satisfaction of having safely delivered her lecture had evidently erased from her mind the possible necessity of emigrating to the British Virgin Islands. As we were finishing our main course, however, one of the waiters approached her and murmured something which seemed to cause her anxiety. With a rather confused apology to the chairman, she rose and left us.
A few minutes later, while we were still eating a most excellent pudding, I observed the entry to the dining room of a uniformed page boy. He approached the table where Patrick Ardmore was sitting and handed him a note. Ardmore, having read it, also rose and left. The page boy continued on his way to Darkside’s table, and a similar procedure followed, though Darkside’s response seemed somewhat more hesitant. Seeing that the page boy was now moving in my direction, I made haste to finish my pudding.
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.
The Sirens Sang of Murder ht-3 Page 12