The Shortest Way to Hades (12 page)

“I was sorry to read,” I said, “of the tragic sequel.”

“The death of poor Miss Robinson? Ah yes, a very sad business. A dreadful ordeal for Miss Galloway, of course—indeed, for the whole family.”

“I believe,” I said, “that you yourself were present when the accident occurred? It seems fortunate—if anything can be so described in such a connection—that the family should have been able to turn to you immediately for your advice and support.”

“I did what I could, naturally. I can hardly claim, however, that such events are within my normal professional experience.” His enthusiasm for me seemed to be cooling.

“Of course not. Nonetheless, one cannot doubt that your presence at such a time would have been of the greatest assistance. In dealing with the police, for example—a lay person without the benefit of professional advice might say all manner of things to the police which prudent reflection would have left unsaid.”

“There was no question of that, Professor Tamar. None of the family had any reason to be anything but entirely candid with the police.”

“Oh,” I said rather quickly, for his tone suggested a desire to treat the subject as closed, “I did not intend to suggest that they had. But the fact that you yourself were a witness—”

“Do let us talk,” said Selena “of something more cheerful.”

My readers will be surprised, perhaps, at this intervention in my questioning of a witness so providentially met with and so material to the subject-matter of my investigation—an investigation, as my readers will recall, undertaken at the particular request of the members of 62 New Square, who might thus have been expected to support me in my inquiries. But no such matter: they had observed my questioning of Tancred with every sign of increasing apprehension; and Selena, as I have said, now chose to change the subject.

Success at the Bar, my readers should further recall, is seldom achieved by offending solicitors.

The conversation consisted thereafter of innocuous legal gossip. It was not until Tancred’s departure—an appointment at his offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields prevented him from lingering—that the subject of my inquiry was touched on again.

“By the way, Miss Larwood,” he said as he rose to leave us, “talking of the Remington-Fiske application, I don’t suppose—I believe I did mention to your Clerk some weeks ago that the probate seemed to have gone astray somehow—I don’t suppose you happened to come across it at all?”

Julia at this showed signs of agitation. She turned the color of a tomato with something on its conscience, and answered with quivering over-emphasis: “No, I haven’t, Mr. Tancred. I don’t have the probate. I never had the probate. There was never any reason for me to have the probate. So there’s no possibility of my now coming across the probate.”

“I really think,” said Selena, “that that must be right, Mr. Tancred. You wouldn’t have put it with Julia’s papers, would you? You’d have lodged it in Court. And when the hearing was over, the Judge’s Clerk would have handed it back to you.”

“Yes,” said the solicitor doubtfully. “Yes, that would be the usual thing, certainly. But I remembered that Miss Larwood had been kind enough to accept instructions at very short notice, and might not have had a complete set of papers. In which case, it occurred to me, the Judge might have handed her the probate for her assistance in the course of the hearing.”

“He didn’t,” said Julia. “I should certainly have remembered so signal a favor. It must have been lost in your office, Mr. Tancred—someone took it out, I expect, to check the investment powers or something of that nature, and forgot to put it back again.”

“That’s really most unlikely, you know, Miss Larwood. We wouldn’t keep an original probate with our ordinary working papers, you see. We would have a copy of the Will on our current file—the final draft, probably, or a copy taken from it—and that’s what we would use for ordinary reference purposes. We would keep the original probate safely in a strongbox, and only take it out when absolutely necessary.” He spoke benignly and a little complacently; for he perceived, I suppose, that Julia would not have thought of such a system, but would have been careful to keep any original document in a place where it could easily be referred to, and spilt coffee over, and mixed up with other papers having nothing to do with it.

“I know what must have happened,” said Selena with triumph, as if hitting on an explanation which when once thought of was manifestly true. “If the probate was with the papers when you left them with the Judge, Mr. Tancred, and you haven’t seen it since, the Judge must have it. He was looking at the affidavits, I dare say, and he put the probate on one side and misplaced it—used it to mark his place in a Law Report, I expect, and then forgot about it. I think your best course, Mr. Tancred, would be to have a tactful word with his Clerk.”

“Well, you may be right, Miss Jardine—I’ll do as you suggest, certainly. But if Miss Larwood would be so kind as to have another look for it…” With a tolerant smile at Julia to show he meant no unkindness, the solicitor took his leave of us.

“It’s an extraordinary thing,” said Julia, “how every solicitor who loses a piece of paper anywhere in the area of Greater London always claims that it’s my fault. It seems to be an official policy of the Law Society.”

“The notion is certainly rather widespread,” said Ragwort, “that if any document goes missing in a case in which you have been concerned it’s probably somewhere on your desk.”

“And it usually is,” said Cantrip. “Are you taking the line this one isn’t?”

“Of course it isn’t,” said Julia. “Selena has just conclusively established that it can’t be.”

“No,” said Selena absent-mindedly. “No, of course it can’t. But it might be a good idea, perhaps, to have just one more look for it among your papers.”

I asked what exactly it was that Julia should not have had but had nonetheless managed to lose. If, as I vaguely imagined, it was the original Will of the late Sir James Remington-Fiske, the matter seemed to be serious: I wondered if its loss might give rise to difficulty when the time came for Camilla to enter upon her inheritance.

“Good heavens, no,” said Selena. “Nothing like that. The probate is the official grant of representation to the executors, with an office copy of the Will bound up inside it. The original Will is filed at the Probate Registry. So there’d never be any serious problem about finding out what it said, even if Tancred lost every single copy on his files.”

“You mean,” I said, “that the loss of the probate is of no consequence?”

“None whatever,” said Julia, her spirits evidently rising. “So even if I had lost it, which I haven’t, it wouldn’t matter in the least.”

“It could be rather a nuisance from the conveyancing point of view,” said Timothy. “You see, Hilary, whenever any of the land is sold a memorandum is supposed to be endorsed on the probate to prevent the same land being sold twice over. So a future purchaser might be rather cross if it couldn’t be produced.” Julia looked discouraged again.

The notion drifted idly across my mind that it is not unheard of for a solicitor to embezzle funds of which he is trustee; and it seemed, from what Timothy had said, that a solicitor who had done so might find it convenient to lose the probate.

It was perhaps unwise to voice these thoughts aloud, for they were immediately received by my companions as asserted and established fact. It seemed to them the most natural and probable thing in the world that Mr. Tancred should behave in such a manner as I had surmised. He was, after all, a solicitor: a member, that was to say, of a profession noted for its lack of financial scruple, owing its entire prosperity to delay in paying Counsel’s fees, and whose invariable practice it was, when the affairs of a client had been mishandled, to put the blame for it on some poor, innocent, hardworking member of the Bar. Only Timothy expressed doubt, and that on merely practical grounds.

“It wouldn’t be quite as easy as you seem to think,” he said. “The tenant for life would have to be a party to the sale, remember, and the purchase money would be paid into a joint account in the names of both the trustees.”

“Hilary is about to remind us,” said Selena, “that the tenant for life is an elderly lady, not, alas, in the best of health, who probably signs anything that her solicitor puts in front of her.”

“And that the co-trustee,” said Ragwort, “is Rupert Galloway—a disreputable financier hoping to benefit from his daughter’s generosity when her inheritance falls into possession. Hilary would suggest, no doubt, that the more flexible sort of conscience might see little harm in anticipating that generosity.”

“So the way you see it, Hilary,” said Cantrip blithely, “is that Tancred and Rupert were in cahoots to trouser some of the trust fund? And Deirdre found out about it somehow, so Tancred did her in to stop her spilling the beans. Do you reckon Rupert was in on that as well?”

I was obliged to disclaim so adventurous a flight of reasoning. I had merely been speculating on the possible explanations for the loss of the probate: I had not suggested for a moment that the solicitor had any responsibility for Deirdre’s death.

“Yes, you did,” said Cantrip. “You were just going to anyway, when he came creeping up on us all suddenly like that. Jolly sinister, if you ask me—probably trying to slip arsenic in our coffee, to stop us exposing him.”

“Oh, I hardly think so, Cantrip,” I said, I fear a little acidly. “He must surely be aware that he is in no danger of exposure from any of the members of 62 New Square. It was clear from your attitude, when I attempted to question him, that none of you would do anything to embarrass a solicitor, however homicidal, from whom your Chambers so regularly receive instructions.”

They were apologetic. It was true, they said, that they had been a little embarrassed at my persisting in a topic of conversation so plainly distasteful to Mr. Tancred. If, however, he was a murderer, then I might rest assured that they would decline all further work from him, whatever the brief fee and however cross Henry might be about it: no Barristers’ Clerk could expect his principals to receive instructions from hands steeped in the blood of innocent beneficiaries, and they would tell Henry so in no uncertain manner.

I advised them not to be premature in making such a sacrifice, for there was at present no reason to believe Mr. Tancred guilty of any crime. He was the only one of the available suspects whose presence in the drawing-room at the material time had not been specifically remarked on by either of our witnesses; but it was possible that they had merely thought it of insufficient interest to be mentioned; conversely, if one of the others had left the drawing-room on some natural and trivial pretext, one would not expect their absence to have been expressly alluded to.

“You mean,” said Cantrip, “if one of them nipped off to the loo, Camilla wouldn’t have bothered telling me about it?”

“Precisely so,” I said. “Nor Leonidas to tell me.”

“It would be an unconvincing pretext,” said Selena, “for someone really meaning to go up to the roof terrace. The door leading to the bathroom and the one leading to the staircase are at opposite ends of the drawing-room. I think the excuse would have had to be that they wanted something from the room at the foot of the staircase—the one Rupert calls his study.”

Julia now asked me what arrangements I intended to make to interview Rupert Galloway.

“My dear Julia,” I said, “to interview Rupert at this stage would be either premature or pointless. The only person I could usefully talk to would be Dorothea—her evidence is crucial, but she is in Corfu. Well, it is possible that something can be arranged. I have had it in mind to spend a little time in Corfu—I have friends there who have kindly said I am welcome at any time—but not until September.”

“You’re not suggesting,” said Julia, “that we do nothing until September?”

“There is nothing we can do,” I answered.

I perceived from her reproachful gaze that she felt her confidence in me to have been misplaced. She did not know exactly what Sir Thomas More would have done; but she plainly thought that he would have done it before September.

To keep Julia confined permanently in her room at 63 New Square, however ample the arrangements for her comfort and well-being, would provoke some objection, I suppose, from one of the humanitarian societies: misguided in my view—Julia, if allowed to wander unrestrained about London, can only come to harm, and it is no kindness to permit her to do so. A truth sufficiently demonstrated by the events which occurred on my next visit.

It was the day, some three weeks later, on which Selena was to leave for the Ionian Islands. At midday, however, I found her still at her desk, looking rather pink and shiny-nosed, her fair hair rumpled and the sleeves of her white shirt pushed back to the elbow, as if she expected by merely physical effort to dispose of the pile of papers which surrounded her.

“It isn’t really as bad as it looks,” she said, leaning back and drawing a deep breath. “I’ve only two Opinions and a Statement of Claim to do, and Sebastian isn’t collecting me until five o’clock. I ought to have finished them by then—in manuscript, that is. Having them typed depends on the temporary typist.” Her optimism seemed to fade a little. “Still, if the worse comes to the worst, they can be typed next week, and Julia can sign them off for me.”

I inquired if Julia was any better than she had been when I last saw her—that is to say, whether she had recovered at all from her anxiety about Deirdre and the traditions of the English Bar and so forth.

“No,” said Selena, after a moment’s reflection “No, I don’t think one could say she was better. It would be more accurate to say”—she paused in apparent search for the
mot juste
—“that she’s worse. Yes, considerably worse. It’s all Cantrip’s fault. His friend on the
Scuttle
reminded him that Rupert Galloway was one of the people involved in that unpleasant business at Rustington a few years ago. Do you remember anything about it?”

The Rustington affair had been one of the more colorful scandals of its day; but though at the time I had followed it with interest I did not now recall the details. A number of moderately celebrated persons—bankers, politicians, television panellists and so forth—had enjoyed the hospitality of a well-known businessman at his house on the Sussex coast; the festivities had been of an unconventional and boisterous nature; and a girl had died, apparently by drowning. Some rather unsavory suggestions had been made as to the cause of death, though none, if my memory served me, of deliberate murder. I did not, however, remember any mention of Rupert in connection with the affair.