The Sirens Sang of Murder (21 page)

Though I continued, as I flew southwards over France, to search for some thread of meaning in the tangled mass of information which had presented itself, all remained dark and obscure. I felt only a curious sense of foreboding—a conviction, which I could not rationally explain, that Monaco was a dangerous place for Cantrip to be and that I ought to persuade him, as a matter of urgency, to return to London.

Although Clementine had made the most admirable arrangements for my journey, including the hire of a motorcar to transport me from Nice airport to Monte Carlo, it was after midnight, by local time, before I finally arrived at the Hotel Clair de Lune. When I mentioned at the reception desk that I believed my friend Mr. Cantrip was also staying there, I had little expectation of seeing him that night. I was told, however, that I would find him in the bar.

It was a long room, furnished in devoted imitation of the Belle Epoque with crimson velvet and gilt-framed looking glasses. There were when I entered only three people in it, but if there had been thirty I daresay the woman sitting curled up on the sofa would still have been the first to attract my notice. Dressed in grey-green chiffon interwoven with silver, with some ornament also of silver shining in her auburn hair, she looked like a nymph in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
in the process of transformation into a fountain, and there was about her movements a corresponding fluidity and charm which would have seduced the eye from women with better claims to be thought beautiful. She was holding a glass of champagne, and the pleasant sound of her laughter reached me as I entered. Sitting in a chair on her right was a tall dark man, evidently in his middle forties, and still with enough good looks to suggest
that in his youth they must have been spectacular. On her left was Cantrip, who appeared to be the cause of her amusement.

Having been in some uncertainty whether Cantrip would welcome my unexpected arrival, I was touched to receive a greeting which seemed to express no less pleasure than astonishment. He introduced me to the Count and Contesta di Silvabianca as a person whose presence would be of inestimable value, and having demanded to know what on earth I was doing in Monte Carlo cheerfully cut off my reply after a scant three words: whatever it was, I was to stop doing it and devote my entire attention to what he termed “the Wellieboots problem.”

I had arrived, it seemed, at a council of war—in consequence of a long-standing dinner engagement, this was the first opportunity the Contessa and her husband had had since returning to Monte Carlo for any discussion with Cantrip of the events of the past three days. He had been relating to them the story of his journey through France, and resumed his narrative with such enthusiasm that there was neither time nor need for me to wonder if I should admit to any previous knowledge of it.

The Contessa’s laughter was soon accounted for. Poor Cantrip was still mystified, it seemed, by the fact of her arriving in St. Malo no later than the judge and himself, and she was too delighted by his perplexity to be in much haste to dispel it.

“Oh, look here, Gabrielle,” said Cantrip, with the beginnings of indignation. “I’ve said I can’t guess. Come on, be a sport and say how you did it.”

“But, Michel,” said the Contessa, “perhaps I do not want to be a sport. Perhaps I want to be very romantic
and mysterious and to make you think I can cross the sea by magic. But I do not think I can make Hilary think so—professors at Oxford do not believe in magic.” She looked at me, still laughing.

“My dear Gabrielle,” I said, for she had invited me to address her by her first name, “I do not doubt that you have all the powers appropriate to an enchantress. I understand, however, that it is not unknown for those engaged in the profession of tax planning to make some alteration to their appearance when they cross international frontiers. I rather suspect that you left Sark in some disguise which Cantrip failed to penetrate and that you travelled on the same boat.”

“Ah, you see,” cried Gabrielle, clapping her hands, and apparently as pleased to be detected as she had been to deceive, “I knew one could not hide anything from an Oxford professor. Of course, Hilary, you are quite right. As you say, I do not like the French authorities to know my travelling arrangements. I do not like the idea that just when I am getting on a plane a gentleman may tap me on the shoulder and say ‘One moment, Madame la Comtesse, there is a little problem with your passport, please answer a few questions,’ and that somehow this little problem cannot be solved until I have told this gentleman the names of my French clients who have accounts in Geneva or Monte Carlo. No, no, no, no, I do not like this at all.” She wagged her forefinger, reproving some imaginary representative of the French fisc.

“Oh, I say,” said Cantrip, “they wouldn’t.”

“But I assure you, Michel, I have friends to whom it has happened. So when I am going to Jersey, for example, I slip into the cloakroom in my favourite café in St. Malo and I put on—oh, some extra clothing, you know,
in case it is cold in the Channel Islands. I put on a thick black dress over my other clothes, and some thick black stockings and some good solid shoes, and a head scarf and one or two shawls. And a big pair of glasses, of course, to keep the wind out of my eyes. And somehow when I come out I do not look so much like the vice president of a wicked Swiss bank with clients who do not want to pay their taxes, but more like a respectable Breton peasant lady who has buried two husbands and has some shopping to do in St. Helier.”

“Oh, look here,” said Cantrip, “you don’t mean you were the old biddy in black? Oh, come off it, Gabrielle, you can’t have been. What about your luggage? What about your passport?”

“But of course I was, Michel—did you really never recognize me? My luggage? I keep a suitcase with some clothes in it at the hotels where I usually stay—for travel I take just a little overnight case, inside the shopping basket. And my passport? Well, I still have my French passport, which does not say that I am the Contessa di Silvabianca but that I am Gabrielle Leclerc, who is a good Frenchwoman born in Brittany in—oh, but you will not expect me to tell you in which year.”

She smiled, almost as if she guessed how much the information would have interested me. Seeing her, I had begun to sympathise with Julia’s inability to offer any useful estimate of her age. Her figure betrayed nothing—she was as slender as Clementine Derwent, though without giving the same impression of boyishness; the rich auburn of her hair might have owed much or little to art, and her face, dominated by large eyes of the ambivalent aquatic colour that Cantrip had remarked upon, was of the structure that changes little between the ages of thirty and fifty. There were some
signs, it is true, of recent strain—faint shadows and hollows which suggested a loss of sleep and appetite, but this evening, at any rate, she seemed in the highest spirits. She rang for more champagne, saying that we must celebrate.

“Carissima,” said her husband, regarding her with slightly mournful dark eyes, “I am happy that you are happy, but I do not quite understand what it is that we are celebrating. When I hear that you—my wife—the Contessa di Silvabianca—have been hunted across France like a wanted criminal, I do not see that it is something to celebrate.” His voice grew warm with indignation at the affront to his aristocratic name.

“Because I know who is hunting me,” said Gabrielle, reaching out to press his hand. “Giovanni, you know how worried I have been this past year.”

“Of course, carissima, how should I not? You go away to these meetings about this Daffodil business and afterwards you are pale and nervous and frightened and not at all like my happy, beautiful wife.” He spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “What can I do? I have begged you to give up the Daffodil case and leave it to Patrick to look after and you will not.”

“Ah, Giovanni,” said his wife, “I know why you do not like my beautiful Daffodil Settlement. It takes me away from home and you have no one to look after you. But I cannot give it up—it is my favourite portfolio and we have done wonderful things together. But it is true that I have been frightened. You see, Hilary, I have thought for more than a year now that someone was following me, spying on me, always when I was away, and always when I was working on this particular case—I must ask you to be discreet, we do not usually mention names. But I could not be certain, you see—I could not
say ‘There is the same man with the big nose and black beard that I saw yesterday.’ It was a matter of instinct, of impression.”

“Had you any idea,” I asked, “who might be doing such a thing?”

“At first, of course, I thought that it was someone from the French Revenue authorities. But—there was something about it somehow that was not quite their style. I began to think that it was someone more sinister, more dangerous, and I was afraid, as Giovanni says. And at other times I wondered if I was imagining things and becoming a little bit mad perhaps. But now—now Michel has discovered that it is only Mr. Justice Wellieboots, who sits in court all day and wriggles his eyebrows at my friend Julia, and who does not frighten me in the least. I do not give that for Mr. Wellieboots.” She snapped her fingers, “Yes, Giovanni, of course it is something to celebrate.”

It was no doubt a sufficient explanation for her present high spirits; but I wondered if she might not have some further, undisclosed reason to be confident that Mr. Justice Welladay would intend no ill towards her.

“If we could be sure that this man could do you no harm,” said her husband, “then it would be something to celebrate. But I do not see how we can be sure of it. I suppose that a judge is a very powerful person, and it is not safe for you to click your fingers at him. Why has he been following you? What does he want? What does he mean to do next? For myself, I cannot be happy until we know these things.”

“It is evident what he wants, chéri. Michel has told us that he does not like people to avoid tax—he has heard something somehow about my Daffodil settlement, which has made such beautiful capital gains, and he
thinks that if he can find out who the beneficiaries are he can make them pay tax, millions of pounds of tax. Poor Mr. Wellieboots, he doesn’t know that he could follow me for a hundred years and read all my letters and listen to all my telephone calls and still not discover who the beneficiaries are, because I do not know it myself.” She evidently found this thought irresistibly entertaining.

Cantrip, however, made haste to concur in her husband’s opinion—he is not a young man to be easily persuaded, once launched on a career of knight errantry, that the damsel can deal with the dragon by herself. It would be a nightmare, he said, for Gabrielle to spend her life thinking that at any moment Mr. Justice Welladay might pop out of the bushes at her; something must be done to put a stop to it once and for all.

“Besides,” he continued, “the more I think about it, the more I don’t think the way he’s acting is the way English judges are supposed to act. I mean, we’ve got things in England like the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus and things, and what they say is that judges can’t go locking people up without giving them a chance to defend themselves. Well, I haven’t done any constitutional law for a couple of years, so I can’t swear that’s exactly what they say, but that’s the gist of it. So what I think is that Wellieboots has gone round the twist.”

“Forgive me,” said the Count, “I do not quite understand.”

“Off his onion,” said Cantrip helpfully. “Loopy. Nutty as a fruitcake. And the problem about people going nutty is that it’s jolly difficult to tell whether they’re harmlessly nutty or dangerously nutty. Anyway, that’s why it’s going to be so frightfully useful having Hilary here—I mean, Oxford dons are always going nutty, so if you can manage to chat to him for a couple
of minutes, you’ll be able to tell how serious it is, won’t you, Hilary?”

“Michel,” said Gabrielle, “I expect that Hilary has come to Monte Carlo to do something quite serious and important and will not at all wish to be involved in this matter of Mr. Justice Wellieboots.”

Though perfect candour would have been injudicious, I wished so far as possible to avoid deception. I accordingly took the opportunity to explain that I myself was in Monte Carlo for reasons connected with the Daffodil settlement, that I had been commissioned by Clementine to investigate the genealogy of the Palgrave family, and that by a curious coincidence my researches had led me to the South of France. There were, I added, one or two points on which I would be grateful for Gabrielle’s assistance, if she were able to spare the time to discuss them.

She seemed delighted to learn that we were all, in a manner of speaking, colleagues—that evening indeed she seemed delighted by everything—and promised me any help that she had power to give. She and Cantrip had had it in mind to meet again for lunch next day, and she suggested that I should join them. Perceiving, however, that he supported the invitation with something less than enthusiasm, I invented a pretext for refusal and arranged instead to lunch with her on the following Monday.

“I wonder,” said Gabrielle as we were finishing our champagne, “how Mr. Wellieboots managed to steal my pen, and why he wanted it.”

“Carissima,” said her husband, “please do not start worrying again about this pen. I do not believe that anyone has stolen it—you have put it down somewhere and forgotten it. Such things happen.”

“No, Giovanni, I have told you—I am always very careful with it, and I am sure that I could not have done that.” She turned towards Cantrip and myself. “You see, I had a rather pretty gold fountain pen, with my initials on it, which Giovanni gave me for a present—I think you have seen it, Michel. And the other evening, when we were dining in Dourdan, I found that it was missing.”

“Look,” said Cantrip, “have you tried to remember when you last used it?”

“Of course I have, Michel, but I simply cannot. I know I must have been using it on Monday afternoon, when we were signing the company documents—I have grown up in an old-fashioned Swiss bank, you know, I would not have used a ballpoint for that. But I can’t be sure that was the last time,”