The Sirens Sang of Murder (20 page)

“Oh dear, Colonel,” said Julia, in despairing protest.

Touched by this womanly remonstrance, the Colonel patted her hand.

“The trip down on the submarine was a bit dreary of course—stuffy and smelly and no room to move, you know what submarines are like—and I can’t say young Arthur did much to brighten things up. I was telling Squiffy about my getaway from the hellhole—you know, dodging Matron and the M.O. and giving the chap in the next bed a yarn to spin them when they noticed I was missing—and blow me if Arthur didn’t get in a flap about it. He’d known I was unofficial, of course, but he hadn’t known I was as unofficial as all that, and he started worrying about whether going AWOL from the hellhole made me a deserter within the meaning of subparagraph something or other of paragraph whatever-it-was of
King’s Regulations
. That’s the kind of chap he was, you see—knew
King’s Regulations
backwards and took it all seriously.

“I told him if we got back all right they probably wouldn’t shoot me for it, and if we didn’t, getting shot for desertion was going to be the least of my worries, but it didn’t do any good. We were in the blasted sub for the best part of eighteen hours, and he went on about it the whole time, except when we were asleep—I daresay
he dreamed about it as well. Nice enough lad, you see, but not a lot of sense.

“The sub came up about a mile off Sark around two in the morning. We got our gear together, blacked up with boot polish, and transferred to the landing craft. The skipper made a few dirty cracks about my chances of finding the right beach—the Navy never think anyone else knows how to navigate—and I told him we’d be back by six and expecting a decent breakfast.

“We got through the rocks all right and made a landing on the western side of the Coupee. There’d been two or three earlier raids on Sark and they’d all landed on the eastern side, up by Derrible Bay, but the latest word was that the beaches there were mined—the last lot had found out the hard way about two months before. So the western side looked like a better bet.

“There’s a path at the northern end of the beach that takes you right up to the top—steepish, but not what you’d call a climb—and I got the landing craft in within a few yards of it. I told Squiffy I was making life a damned sight too easy for him, and off he went with the rest of the chaps.

“The next couple of hours were pretty quiet. We’d picked a night with no moon, of course, so I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, to say nothing of anything else. I couldn’t hear anything either, which was a pretty good sign—if the chaps had run into trouble, there’d have been some noise. So I just sat in the landing craft with nothing to do except wonder what was going on and curse the M.O. for keeping me in plaster. The only thing I was worried about was getting back to the sub on time. It had been pretty decent of the skipper to give us until six—he had to get the sub underwater again by dawn, of course, and it didn’t leave
much leeway—so we couldn’t expect him to cut it any finer.

“Then I heard firing—only two or three shots, but it sounded loud enough to wake up every German on the island—and it looked as if things might be going to liven up a bit.

“I made sure we were ready for a quick getaway, and a few minutes later I heard someone slithering down the path, making a good deal more noise than they ought to. It turned out to be Welladay and another chap—tough little Glaswegian called McCormack, straight from the Gorbals—he’d been shot in the shoulder and was bleeding quite a bit. Welladay wasn’t hurt, but he was looking pretty shaken. I helped him haul McCormack aboard the landing craft and asked what the blazes had happened and where the others had got to.

“He said things had gone pretty well to begin with. They’d spotted a German sentry patrolling the Coupee and followed him back to base. That turned out to be a guard hut at the southern end, just inside Little Sark. The sentry was on his own there and not expecting any trouble, so taking the hut was money for old rope. They had him tied up and gagged before he knew what was happening and just shoved him into a corner, meaning to bring him back with them when they were finished. Welladay and McCormack stayed to search the hut and keep an eye on the prisoner while the other three went off to scout round Little Sark.

“You probably think searching a guard hut would be pretty easy, but it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. There was a desk and a cupboard, both full of all sorts of papers—too much to bring the whole lot back—so they had some sorting to do. Trouble was, it was damned difficult to know what was going to be useful from the
point of view of intelligence. You couldn’t expect to find something marked ‘Hitler to Goering—Top Secret’; it was local newspapers and letters from girlfriends and things like that that the intelligence geezers got excited about. Toffee papers even—I once knew a chap) in intelligence who claimed he could predict the whole German strategy for the next six months if he knew what they were wrapping their toffees in.

“So Welladay and McCormack were kept pretty busy trying to work out what was worth taking and what wasn’t, with just an oil lamp to see by, and it’s not too surprising that they weren’t taking much notice of the prisoner. Pity they didn’t, though—he must have had a gun stashed away quite near to where they’d left him, and whoever tied him up didn’t seem to have made much of a job of it—so all of a sudden they were under fire.

“McCormack was hit and Welladay fired back—couldn’t do anything else—and the German was killed. After that amount of noise, of course, they had to expect trouble pretty quickly. No more sorting papers—Welladay just stuffed what he could into a sack while McCormack checked the mían was dead and took his gun, and then they got out fast.

“I was still telling young Welladay it was hard luck about losing the prisoner but not his fault, and a damned good thing he’d reacted as fast as he did, when the rest of the chaps came scrambling down the path and into the landing craft. We didn’t hang about to swap yarns, and we must have been about a hundred yards from shore and still rowing hard when McCormack said the thing that got us worried.

“I don’t remember it exactly—something about the German having been ‘a braw wee fighter’ and what a
fine trick it was to have fired the gun when his hands were still tied behind his back. Welladay said something like ‘Oh, nonsense, McCormack, he must have got free before he starting firing,’ and McCormack said, ‘Oh no, sir, I noticed when I took his gun—his hands were still tied.’ Welladay said, ‘Are you sure?’ and McCormack said, ‘Oh yes, sir,’ as if it was nothing to worry about—if McCormack had ever heard of the Geneva Convention he probably thought it was something to do with football. Welladay said, ‘I see,’ and sounded fairly sick.

“I felt a bit sick myself, because however you added it up, it came out not looking too good. When the Germans found the body it was going to look as if we’d shot an unarmed prisoner with his hands tied, and apart from what they’d make of it on the propaganda side, they were liable to take it out pretty roughly on our chaps in their POW camps.

“Not really young Welladay’s fault—if a chap’s firing at you, you assume he’s got his hands free—but he ought to have checked all the same. I suppose he must have thought so himself—the next thing he said was ‘I’m going back’ and he was over the side and swimming for the shore before anyone could stop him.

“Everyone stopped rowing for a second or two—then Squiffy just shook his head and said carry on. We all knew the lad would be shot if the Germans got him—they didn’t treat commando raiders as prisoners of war—but there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. We were cutting it pretty fine already for getting back to the sub, and we just couldn’t spare the time to hang around on the off chance of picking him up again. So we went on, and that looked like being the end of my acquaintance with young Arthur Welladay.”

The Colonel sat looking out of the window across the
sunlit lawns of New Square, his gaze perhaps drawn by the War Memorial, apparently oblivious of his immediate surroundings. The rest of us also remained silent, as if forgetting for a moment that the young man he spoke of had not after all died on the cliff tops of Sark on that bleak and moonless night in 1944 but had lived to enjoy success and age and high honours.

“But in fact,” said Selena gently, after some moments, “it was not?”

“Not a bit of it,” said the Colonel, his attention recalled to the present. “I ran into him in Normandy six months later. It seemed he’d got ashore all right and fallen in with some girl—she’d kept him hidden until the summer. When the news got through that the Allies had taken St. Malo, they’d escaped to Brittany together in a fishing boat. It was quite a romantic story, but I don’t remember the details.”

“You don’t happen,” I said, “to recall the girl’s name?”

“’fraid not, Professor,’” said the Colonel apologetically. “It’s a long time ago.”

“Julia,” I said, “how old, in your estimation, is the Contessa di Silvabianca?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Julia, looking bewildered. “Her looks have a degree of individuality which makes it difficult to judge, and she is not a woman of whom I should care to ask so personal a question. Since one knows that she is not precisely in her first youth, I suppose one might describe her as being in the full bloom of her second.”

“Would you think it possible,” I said, “that she was born at the end of 1944 or the beginning of 1945?”

“Oh, quite possible,” said Julia. “Hilary, what on earth are you suggesting?”

“I am suggesting that the Contessa is Welladay’s daughter. That would perhaps explain his evident interest in her movements. It would also mean, of course, that she, too, is a descendant of Sir Walter Palgrave.”

“Hilary,” said Selena, “you do realize, don’t you, that you haven’t a scrap of proper evidence for this idea?”

“And even if you’re right,” said Ragwort, “I would have thought that the settlement would probably be drawn in such a way as to exclude illegitimate issue.”

“It does not necessarily follow,” I said, “that it excludes the Contessa—if there was a child, there may well have been a marriage. I think it is time—if you will be so kind, my dear Ragwort, as to permit me to use your telephone—that I spoke again to Clementine Derwent.”

Clementine’s view of the urgency of my investigation had not altered in the day that had passed since our last meeting. When I told her that my enquiries had revealed one, perhaps two, of the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave to be at present in Monte Carlo—I thought it premature and possibly indiscreet to disclose their identity—she at once undertook the arrangements necessary to enable me to travel there that night.

It will be, I fear, with some surprise, perhaps even with irritation, that you remark, dear reader, how many pages yet remain before my narrative reaches its conclusion, wondering, when the truth concerning the deaths of Grynne and Malvoisin is already plain, with what maundering irrelevancies I can have contrived to fill them. It would little become the Scholar, however, to sacrifice candour to vanity: whatever derision I may incur for my slow-wittedness, I am obliged to admit that to me, despite all I had learnt that day, the truth concerning these matters was still by no means clear.

To say that the evidence was as yet circumstantial rather than conclusive, or that I had had no sufficient opportunity to reflect on it, would be but paltry excuses. If I say anything in extenuation of my failure to perceive its true significance, it must be, I suppose, that the truth was of such a nature as to be, to a person of my temperament and upbringing, almost literally unthinkable.