The Sirens Sang of Murder (6 page)

The arrival of Ragwort and Selena distracted Julia from her Finance Bill and me from further reflection on Cantrip’s telex message. Not until Selena had purchased a bottle of Nierstein and we were all comfortably settled round the little candlelit table did it occur to me
to ask Julia whether it was in fact the Cayman Islands or the Turks and Caicos that she had visited in the previous year.

She answered, with a dreamy and distant look, that it was indeed the Cayman Islands.

“Properly regarded,” said Selena, gazing thoughtfully into her glass, “your experiences last year in the Cayman Islands could be incorporated very nicely,
Julia, into this book that you and Cantrip are writing. Have you considered at all why your heroine is so cold and aloof, so reluctant to admit to any of the gentler passions?”

“I confess,” said Julia, “that I have assumed these qualities to be natural to her.”

“Oh no, surely not—I don’t think that would be at all sympathetic. No, as I see it, when Cecilia Mainwaring first came to the Bar she was a warm, generous, open-hearted girl whose clear, candid eyes gazed with trusting eagerness on the world about her. What has happened to change her? Why does that generous heart now wear the mask of cold indifference? Why do those candid eyes now flash with icy disdain? Ah, you may well ask.”

“You suggest that it is because she went to the Cayman Islands?”

“Because she went to the Cayman Islands, as you did, Julia, for reasons connected with her practise as a tax barrister, and there, as you did, she met—a man.” Selena invested the word with overtones of the monstrous. “A man much older than herself, an urbane and sophisticated man, experienced in the ways of the world. What could she know of such men, poor Cecilia, whose life had been spent in the chaste cloisters of Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn? Accustomed to the innocent banter and boyish camaraderie of her contemporaries, how could she resist his subtle and practised charm? In the sensuous warmth of the Caribbean night, fragrant with the scent of a hundred exotic flowers, she gave him her heart. He trifled with it for a while as lightly as a child with a new toy, and as lightly afterwards cast it aside.”

“Oh Selena, how sad,” said Julia, deeply moved. “But
whether it’s an entirely fair account, so far as my own visit is concerned—”

“A most affecting tale,” said Ragwort, “remarkable for bearing no resemblance whatever to what happened to Julia in the Cayman Islands. If I recall the story correctly, Julia, you behaved extremely badly, and took advantage of a harmless, good-natured man who had not deserved ill of you.”

Julia, always willing to see both if not more sides of every question, seemed to find some difficulty in choosing between the versions of events proposed by her two friends. I suggested that she should tell me, quite simply and in her own words, precisely what had occurred.

In the previous November she had been appearing in a case before the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands—the details, though no doubt, as she claimed, of absorbing interest to any student of the law relating to bearer securities, are of no relevance to my present narrative. She had been accompanied by her instructing solicitor, who happened to be Clementine Derwent, and their visit had coincided with a meeting of those concerned with the Daffodil Settlement. The discretion customary among Swiss bankers and their advisers had precluded any mention of the actual name, but save that Clementine’s firm was at that time represented by Oliver Grynne, the senior partner, the meeting had been attended by the same people as that which had just taken place in Jersey and could safely be presumed to relate to the same matter.

“You will no doubt tell me,” I said, “that there is some perfectly good reason for those administering a Jersey settlement to meet in the Cayman Islands.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Julia. “It wouldn’t do at all, you see, for the funds of the settlement to be directly invested
in the shares of companies resident in a high-tax jurisdiction such as the United Kingdom or the United States. The sensible thing is for the trustee of the settlement—

in this case Edelweiss (Channel Islands) Ltd.—to own shares in a private company resident in, let us say, the Cayman Islands and for that company to own shares in another private company resident in, let us say, Sark. The Sark company would be the one which owned the underlying investments—shares in ICI or General Motors or whatever it may be. The directors of the private companies, of course, would include one or two officials of the trust company and their professional advisers. And since a company is treated for tax purposes as resident in the country where its directors take their decisions, it’s essential for the directors of each company to have at least one board meeting a year in the place where it’s supposed to be resident.”

“There is nothing remarkable, then, about your having encountered the same group of people in the Cayman Islands whom Cantrip has been advising in Jersey?”

“By no means,” said Julia. “The world of tax planning is in some ways a fairly small one—one sees the same doorplates on the offices in Georgetown and St. Helier as one would in Bishopsgate or Lombard Street. I already knew most of the people involved in the Daffodil Settlement.”

I asked if she had had any previous acquaintance with Cantrip’s contessa.

“I’d met her once before—Clementine introduced me to her at a tax-planning seminar in Luxembourg about two years ago. Stingham’s are the London solicitors for the Edelweiss group, so she and Clementine
have a good deal to do with each other. We all played truant together from one of the official dinners and did our bit to reduce the problem of the champagne lake. I’d been hoping I’d run into her again sometime, but she doesn’t seem to travel abroad very much. Most of what she does can be done from her office in Monte Carlo.”

“What exactly does she do?”

“She invests other people’s money for them—according to Clementine, with astonishing brilliance.”

“The name,” I said, “seems vaguely familiar. Wasn’t her husband once noted for some kind of sporting activity? Riding horses or driving motorcars or something of that sort?”

“I think he was a tennis player,” said Julia.

“Ah yes,” I said, remembering now that it was indeed in that sport that the Count di Silvabianca had fifteen or twenty years before achieved celebrity. Though he had never been quite among the first rank of players, his title and his exceptional good looks had combined to make him interesting to the gossip columnists and a certain portion of the public. I concluded that the Contessa shared Julia’s taste in profiles.

They also had in common, it seemed, an extreme distaste for the advances of Edward Malvoisin, which neither Julia’s diplomatic deception nor the Contessa’s devotion to her husband were ever quite sufficient to discourage. They had commiserated, on their first evening in the Cayman Islands, about the need to avoid doing or saying anything during their stay which Malvoisin might construe as encouragement.

“The trouble was,” said Julia, “that we could think of very few things that he wouldn’t construe as encouragement. We had no doubt, for example, that for either of
us to appear on the beach in any form of bathing costume, however decorous, would seem to him the clearest possible invitation to seize upon us in the manner of a hungry schoolboy claiming the last cream bun. And it would have been difficult, of course, to avoid him altogether. Fortunately, however, it turned out that Clementine found him unobjectionable—it’s curious, isn’t it, how tastes differ in these matters?—and agreed, as it were, to draw his fire in exchange for Gabrielle and me each buying her a large pina colada.”

“Gideon Darkside,” I said, “also sounds like someone whom one might wish to avoid—did you know him as well?”

“Oh yes,” said Julia with a weary sigh, “I knew Gideon Darkside. I once had the misfortune to call him as a witness before the Special Commissioners for the purpose of proving that certain accounts he had prepared were an accurate reflection of the events which had occurred. I had imagined, in my innocence, that this was a mere formality. I was therefore disconcerted when he was cross-examined on behalf of the Revenue for five hours, during which it became clear that any similarity between what had actually happened and what the accounts said had happened was purely accidental. And when he found that this was attracting unfavourable comment from the Commissioners, he became hurt and resentful—he seemed to think that preparing false accounts was a perfectly usual and accepted method of tax planning.”

“I suppose,” said Ragwort, “that he is simply one of those all too numerous people who have no idea of the difference between right and wrong.”

“I suspect,” said Julia, “that he thinks things are wrong only if one enjoys them, and is able on that basis
to regard himself as a man of the highest moral character. But at least there was no difficulty about avoiding him—he makes a point of always being too busy for idle amusement. He likes it to be known, you see, that he works harder than anyone else—that is to say, that he spends more time giving bad advice to his clients than other people do giving good advice to theirs.”

“So you knew everyone,” I said, “except Oliver Grynne and Patrick Ardmore?”

“Oh,” said Julia, “I’d met Oliver Grynne once or twice. As I may have mentioned, I’m quite often instructed by Stingham’s. I rather liked him—he was slightly pedantic sometimes, and he had a morbid obsession about keeping fit, but he was a very good lawyer. No, the only one I hadn’t met at all was Patrick Ardmore.”

Julia lit a Gauloise and adopted what she intended, I believe, to be a very casual expression.

“On our first evening in Grand Cayman I was sitting with Clementine and Gabrielle in a little bar called the Cayman Arms, overlooking Georgetown Harbour, buying pina coladas in accordance with the bargain previously mentioned. Gabrielle had mentioned that her colleague from Jersey might be joining us, but it didn’t at once occur to me, when Patrick Ardmore came into the bar, that he was the person she had referred to. He had—I don’t quite know how to describe it—a slightly adventurous look, which one doesn’t usually associate with bankers.”

“I should hope not indeed,” said Ragwort.

“All the same, he was not at all the kind of man I usually find attractive. He had unquestionably entered on his fifth decade, and it did not seem to me that his profile, even in youth, would have had the classic
perfection of—say, yours, my dear Ragwort. He had not, it is true, let himself go, as men so often do when they have found someone to marry them and think they don’t need to take any trouble with their appearance anymore—there was no blurring of the jawline or unsightly bulge over the waistband. Nonetheless, as he approached our table I was surprised to find myself thinking…” Julia paused and looked dreamily at the ceiling, drawing deeply on her Gauloise.

“Thinking,” said Ragwort, “if that is indeed the appropriate word for what we take to have been a not wholly cerebral activity—thinking what, precisely?”

“Thinking,” said Julia, “and I agree, of course, that it was not a process in which the intellect was predominant—thinking, as it were, ‘Dear me, what a remarkably stylish bit of goods.’ Or words to the like effect. What I chiefly experienced was a sudden shortness of breath and a peculiar queasiness in the pit of the stomach, similar to mild indigestion.”

“At her first sight of him,” said Selena firmly, “her pulse quickened, and she was stirred by a strange emotion which she could find no words to describe.”

By a fortunate or unfortunate coincidence, it had happened that Julia and Ardmore were staying at the same hotel, close to the midpoint of West Bay Beach, while the rest of the party were accommodated at another establishment on the same long stretch of golden sand but a mile or two further north of Georgetown. It was accordingly natural that they should form the habit of concluding the evening in each other’s company, drinking a last glass of wine together under the palm trees at the bar beside the swimming pool.

“And it was on these evenings,” said Selena, “amid the exotic scents of the Caribbean night, while the air
throbbed with the intoxicating rhythms of the calypso and the waves foamed sensuously across the sand, that this man without pity or scruple undertook his conquest of a trusting and innocent heart. Under the tropic moon he murmured to her of—what precisely did he murmur of, Julia?”