The Sirens Sang of Murder (11 page)

On the following morning she had breakfasted in the hotel dining room in the company of Ardmore and Darkside. The waitress who served them gave them also a full account of the misadventures of Albert, as a result of which the road across the Coupee was blocked by the overturned carriage. They had remained in the dining room to await news of its removal, neither curious nor concerned as to the precise whereabouts of the rest of the party.

Soon after nine o’clock they were told that the Coupee was clear again, but the next boat for Guernsey did not sail until noon, and there seemed no merit in haste. The three of them, therefore, were still in the dining room when Philip Alexandre brought the bad news.

Two fishermen sailing along the eastern coast of the island had seen a body lying on the rocks below the Coupee. They had managed with some difficulty to take it on board their boat, conscientiously marking with an impromptu flag the place where it had lain. On reaching harbour, they had sent an urgent message to the Constable, the member of the Sark community responsible, under the authority of the Seneschal, for the maintenance of public order.

The Constable had recognised the dead man at once as a frequent visitor to the island, and had known that Philip Alexandre was the person with whom he most
commonly had dealings. It was the Jersey advocate Edward Malvoisin.

“Of course,” said Clementine, leaning back with a deep sigh, “it could have been an accident. So could Oliver Grynne getting drowned. But that means there’ve been two fatal accidents within six months to people connected with the Daffodil Settlement, and it struck me as a bit over the odds. I couldn’t think what to do about it, though. I’ve nothing solid enough to go to the police with. And anyway, the clients would have fits—you know what Swiss bankers are like about secrecy. And then I thought of you, Professor Tamar. I remembered one or two things that Cantrip had said about you and about that problem Julia had in Venice and I thought—well, I thought that if you were involved in the case perhaps you might come across something.”

“It is true,” I said, “that I have had some little success in applying the methods of Scholarship to one or two somewhat similar matters.” I was touched and rather surprised that the boy should have spoken to her of these achievements. They had not always seemed to me to receive in New Square the degree of recognition which an unprejudiced observer might think them to deserve. “I trust, however, that Cantrip has not given you an exaggerated notion of my abilities—there is nothing miraculous about them.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Clementine. “What he said was—well, what he actually said was that you were awfully good at picking up odds and ends of gossip and finding out things that weren’t any of your business.”

Making allowances for the Cambridge idiom, I supposed I must consider it a tribute. I enquired whether she had spoken of her fears to any of her colleagues.

“No—I didn’t have a chance to talk to Patrick in private,
and Gideon Darkside’s the last person that I’d want to discuss it with. And I haven’t seen Cantrip or Gabrielle at all since it happened. We didn’t have time to look for them, you see—the Constable wanted us to go straight over to the harbour and confirm the identification, and anyway, Philip Alexandre seemed to think that they’d probably gone on ahead of us. So somehow or other we all missed each other—I think they must both have left Sark without hearing the news about Edward.”

I knew that Cantrip had not yet returned to Chambers; the Contessa also, it seemed, was still absent from her office in Monte Carlo.

“I tried ringing her there this morning, and she wasn’t back yet. But you see, Professor Tamar, I didn’t really expect her to be. She’d been meaning to meet her husband somewhere near Paris and spend two or three days driving south with him. She says he gets fed up when she goes off on business trips, so she always tries to make up for it by having a short holiday on her own with him afterwards.” Clementine smiled indulgently at this matrimonial bargaining. “If she left Sark without hearing about poor old Edward, then there’s no reason for her to have changed her plans. I’m not really worried about her.” I perceived, however, that this last was not entirely true.

“Your reasoning,” I said, “is not as yet entirely clear to me. I quite appreciate that the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave, if of a mercenary disposition, would wish to ensure that the identity of the settlor was never discovered and that the trust company was therefore unable to exercise its discretion in accordance with his wishes. You tell me, however, that of all those concerned with the settlement, your late senior partner,
Oliver Grynne, was the only one who knew the identity of the settlor. So far as his death is concerned, the Palgrave descendants have a motive—but what motive do they have for disposing of Edward Malvoisin?”

“I’m afraid,” said Clementine apologetically, “that it’s not quite as simple as that. You see, when I say that Oliver was the only one who knew who the settlor was, I don’t exactly mean that the others didn’t know. Well, not exactly. What I mean is—well, that they did sort of know, but they’d—well, sort of forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” I said. Though I have no personal experience of such matters, I would have supposed that the establishment of a trust fund in excess of nine million pounds sterling would infallibly ensure that one’s name lived, if not in history, at least in the memory of one’s accountants and investment advisers. “Forgotten?”

“Well, Professor Tamar, what you’ve got to remember is that back in the early seventies the Edelweiss company in Jersey was setting up settlements like this by the barrel load. Patrick and Gabrielle were both there then, and between them they probably did several hundred a year—mostly in the couple of months before the Budget. You couldn’t expect anyone to remember off the cuff which settlement was whose. And there wasn’t anything special about Daffodil. It’s a bit special now, of course, because Gabrielle did some rather brilliant things with the investments and the settlor never seems to have wanted much out of it, so it’s built up into quite a tidy sum. But when it started it was quite an ordinary size of fund—a few hundred thousand quid.”

I endeavoured to appear suitably contemptuous of so inconsiderable a sum.

“Each settlement would have been given a name—
the year they did Daffodil they were all called after flowers—and the documents and correspondence relating to it would have been filed under that name. And they’d be awfully careful to see that the settlor’s name was never mentioned anywhere on the file, because the whole idea was that if the file got into the wrong hands, there still wouldn’t be anything to show who’d really made the settlement. But there’d be a code number on the file corresponding to a number on an index at the bank’s office in Geneva, which would give you the name of the settlor. It’s a tremendously sophisticated system.”

“And completely foolproof, no doubt.”

“Oh, absolutely. Well, it would be, except that the Daffodil file’s somehow lost its code number. I suppose someone’s secretary decided to replace the folder and didn’t realise how important it was to copy the number on the cover.”

“I see,” I said. “But are you sure that Oliver Grynne had not also forgotten who the settlor was?”

“Oh yes, Professor Tamar, there’s no doubt about that. The settlor was one of Oliver’s personal clients, and it was Oliver who advised him to make the settlement and did all the arrangements. And naturally he went on being the contact man between the settlor and everyone else involved. It was through Oliver that they got the news that the settlor had died—he made an announcement about it on the first day of their meeting in the Cayman Islands.”

“But in all the years since the settlement was made, did he never once mention the name of the settlor? And did it never once occur to any of the others to ask him what it was?”

“Well no. You see, Professor Tamar, in the tax-planning
business one rather gets in the habit of not using the client’s name, even in private, unless one absolutely has to—walls have ears, and all that. And none of the others would exactly have thought that they didn’t know who the settlor was—they’d have thought they did know, but just couldn’t remember offhand. Like a telephone number that one’s got somewhere in one’s address book. It wasn’t until several weeks after Oliver died that we realised—”

“That you had, as it were, lost the address book?”

“Yes. I thought to begin with, when I found the name wasn’t mentioned on Oliver’s Daffodil file, that all I had to do was go through all his files for his personal clients and I’d be sure to spot the right person. Well, I’ve done that and not found anything. But of course that’s all we’ve done so far—go through files in our various offices. I’m certainly not advising my clients to throw the sponge in at this stage. If everyone who was involved in Daffodil when it was set up really gets down to work on it—you know, going through their personal diaries and old letters so on, and working out exactly what they were doing and who they were meeting at the time—then I think that between them they’re practically bound to remember something that leads us to the right answer.” Her schoolboyish face, which had brightened with enthusiasm for this energetic enterprise, was clouded again by anxiety. “The trouble is, it looks to me as if someone else thinks the same thing.”

“Were all those now professionally concerned with the settlement involved in its setting up?”

“Yes—except me of course. I didn’t come into it until after Oliver died. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily had any direct contact with the settlor. Edward Malvoisin would have been responsible for preparing
the trust deed, because theoretically it was a Jersey settlement. But he’d have used a draft provided by Oliver, and probably drafted by Counsel in London, to make sure it did the right things from the point of view of U.K. tax law. And he’d have got his instructions through the trust company, so there wouldn’t have been any need for him actually to meet the settlor.”

“And how did Gideon Darkside come into the picture?”

“Well, I suppose Oliver thought there ought to be an accountant involved and he brought in Gideon. We used to have quite a close relationship with Gideon’s firm in those days—they still had one or two people who actually knew something about tax, and Gideon was still relatively junior, so no one realised what a dead loss he was. I suppose it’s quite lucky that Daffodil’s the only case where we’re still lumbered with him. I’d expect Oliver to have introduced him to the settlor, but Gideon claims he can’t remember anything about it. And of course his idea of efficiency is to destroy all documents wholesale when they’re more than six years old, so there’s nothing at all on his files.”

“The settlor, I suppose, would have wished at some stage to meet a senior representative of the company which was to be entrusted with his money—Patrick Ardmore or the Contessa?”

“Oh,” said Clementine, with the expression of a schoolboy about to disclose some lively item of gossip about the headmaster, “Patrick may have dealt with some of the paperwork, but the meeting would quite definitely have been with Gabrielle. Poor old Oliver was absolutely potty about her, you see, so there’s no way he’d have passed up an excuse to set up a meeting with her. I think that’s why he hung on to the Daffodil case—
he ought really to have handed it over to someone a bit more junior, but that would have meant not seeing her at Daffodil meetings.” Her smile faded again. “So if anyone’s going to remember anything about the settlor, Gabrielle’s the most likely person. And that’s why—I don’t exactly mean I’m worried about her, Professor Tamar, but I’d be awfully pleased to know for certain that she really is safely on her way home with her husband.”

Reflecting on what she had told me, I found myself suffering from a curious confusion of mind, of the kind which might be induced by some mild hallucinogen—the inevitable consequence, I suppose, of having anything to do with the world of international tax planning. Clementine’s theories seemed at one moment entirely absurd and fanciful; at the next, utterly persuasive.

“I suppose,” I said eventually, “that there will be an inquest on Edward Malvoisin?”

“The body’s been sent over to Guernsey for an autopsy. The Guernsey CID will report back to the Seneschal of Sark and he’ll hold an inquest. If there are no signs of violence, I suppose the verdict will be accidental death.”

“Is it known from what point he fell? Was it from the Coupee itself or could it have been from somewhere on Little Sark?”

“No, he must have fallen from somewhere near the middle of the Coupee. I saw the place on the way back—the fishermen had marked it with a flag.”

“And they saw the body, as I understand it, while the entrance to the Coupee from Little Sark was still blocked by the overturned carriage. If that is right, then he must have left Little Sark sometime on the previous evening, before Albert’s accident. But he was still in the
bar, you say, when you retired for the night at about quarter past ten. It seems a rather eccentric hour to go out for a walk along the cliffs on a dark and windy night. Have you any idea why he went?”

“No—no idea at all,” said Clementine. It seemed to me, however, that she had hesitated, as she had done before when deciding to be something less than candid.

“Is there any possibility that he might have committed suicide?”

“Oh no, Professor Tamar, not with Edward. Poor Edward, he may not have been popular with everyone, but he was always popular with himself.”

“It could still have been an accident, however. Were it not for the previous death, you would suspect nothing more sinister.”

“I suppose not,” said Clementine. “But I don’t actually see how it could have happened. Edward was quite heavily built, and the railings would have come up to his waist. If he’d simply stumbled, they’d have stopped him going over the edge. If he’d been leaning over them, I suppose he might have overbalanced, but why on earth
should
he lean over, specially in the pitch dark? I just don’t see how it could have happened, unless…” She shivered and looked towards the window, as though seeing in the distance beyond not the sunlit thoroughfares of the City but the remote and desolate clifftop, which played, as I now recalled, so prominent and sinister a role in the folklore of Sark.