The Sirens Sang of Murder (25 page)

“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 mentioned 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 settling 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 daresay, 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.

From the entrance to the Grand Hotel there is an admirable view across St. Aubyn’s Bay to Elizabeth Castle, named by Sir Walter Raleigh in honour of his formidable sovereign and built on the islet where the hermit Helier, patron saint of Jersey and its capital, was martyred in the sixth century by marauding Norsemen. Alighting from my taxi on the following morning, however, I spared the historic fortress no more than a glance before turning to make my way towards the reception desk.

Weary though I was from rising before dawn and from the rigours of my journey, my steps were quickened by an anxiety more urgent than the desire for rest. My attempts to communicate by telephone with Cantrip, directly or through any of our mutual acquaintance, had all proved fruitless. Eventually, finding that I chanced to have in my possession a letter bearing the telex number of Julia’s Chambers, I had prevailed on the telex operator at the Clair de Lune to transmit a message to her; but I had been obliged to express myself in terms more guarded than I would have wished, and in any case had little hope of its being read in time to be of the slightest use.

I had no need to enquire the whereabouts of Clementine
Derwent, for she was standing at the reception desk, engaged in what seemed to be a mildly acrimonious conversation with a member of the hotel management. She looked flustered, like a schoolboy who has been overoptimistic about the time required for his homework, and despite the civility of her greeting I was not entirely sure that she was pleased to see me.

“It’s awfully good of you to come, Professor Tamar, but I really didn’t mean to drag you all the way back from Monte Carlo. That’s why I didn’t send you a telex about the meeting.”

“My dear Clementine,” I said, “that was most thoughtful of you. The fact is, however, that I am not here solely for the purpose of the meeting. There is something I have to discuss with Cantrip, as a matter of some urgency, and I was expecting to find him here. Perhaps, however, you thought his presence unnecessary at this particular meeting?”