The Sirens Sang of Murder (19 page)

There was much indignation. Cantrip by his absence had imposed, it was felt, quite sufficient inconvenience on his fellow juniors without the additional burden of conveying to Henry the unconciliatory message suggested in his final paragraph. Ragwort was especially severe. His sense of the world’s unfairness, assuaged in respect of St. Malo and Dourdan by the thought of Cantrip starving in a wine cellar, had been rekindled by the image of him breakfasting in the ancient city of the Popes, oblivious and undeserving of its architectural and artistic glories.

My own attention remained preoccupied by the deplorable possibility which had presented itself and was beginning, the more I reflected on it, to seem increasingly probable.

“Basil,” I said, when at last I had a chance to be heard, “there is a question, if you would be so kind, which I should like to ask you. When you spoke a day or two ago of teasing Sir Arthur Welladay—”

I was interrupted, however, by the reappearance of Lilian, announcing the arrival of Colonel Cantrip.
Knowing his concern for the safety of his nephew, she had telephoned him at his club to tell him of the telex message, and the old soldier had lost no time in coming round to New Square to see it for himself.

Expressing in graceful phrases his delight at the Colonel’s visit, Basil gave no sign that he had or could have any claim on his time more pressing than the entertainment of this new and honoured guest. The Colonel was settled in a comfortable armchair and provided with a cup of tea. Julia, after a moment’s hesitation—she no doubt wondered, but sensibly not for long, if his feelings might be wounded by the reference to himself—handed him the telex.

“My dear Hilary,” said Basil, extending his long hands in a gesture which seemed to promise a cornucopia of enlightenment, “there was some matter on which you thought that I might be of assistance?”

“It is concerned,” I said, “with the provisions of a discretionary settlement, of the kind which I understand to have been in vogue in the early part of the 1970s. Julia was telling me a few days ago that at that time the Revenue regarded the persons entitled in default of appointment, even if they never actually received anything from the settled fund, as liable for tax on gains realised by the trustees, A practice developed, I gather—Julia called it ‘teasing the Revenue’—of naming as the default beneficiary some person professionally committed, as it were, to upholding and defending their opinion—the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for example, or the chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Have I understood the matter correctly?”

“Perfectly correctly,” said Basil. “I cannot attempt to improve on Julia’s account of it. You must understand, of course, that it was not generally intended that the
Revenue should ever become aware of the existence of the settlement, but it was thought that if they did, the inclusion of such a provision would embarrass them sufficiently to afford us all a little innocent amusement. Dear me, I’m afraid you will think us disgracefully frivolous.”

“And may I ask,” I continued, “whether you ever happened—”

Henry entered, his brow dark with displeasure, to apologise with heavy sarcasm for interrupting the tea party and to inform Basil of the arrival of those attending his next consultation: “Mr. Netherspoon, sir, of Netherspoon and Co. With his client, sir—and you know what His Grace is like if he’s kept waiting. I did remind you this morning, sir, I didn’t think you’d have forgotten again already.”

“I hadn’t forgotten, Henry,” said Basil. “I simply didn’t expect them quite so soon, if punctuality is the politeness of princes, then it seems rather presumptuous of a mere duke to be so ostentatiously on time. Dear me, how extremely tiresome. Colonel Cantrip—Hilary—I’m afraid, as you see, that you’ll have to excuse me.”

Selena had already begun to collect teacups, Ragwort to plump up cushions, and Julia to shepherd the Colonel towards the door.

“Basil, forgive me,” I said, “but I must ask you one further question. Did you ever happen, by any chance, to combine your teasing of the Revenue with your teasing of Sir Arthur Welladay by making him the default beneficiary under such a settlement?”

“Why yes,” said Basil, his attention already almost entirely engrossed by the papers for his consultation. “Yes, Hilary, now that you mention it, I believe I sometimes did. I don’t think I ever mentioned him by name—
that would somehow have seemed rather crude. It seemed more elegant to bring him in by way of a class gift.”

“To the descendants of a named individual?”

“Exactly.”

“You would have had to know the name, then, of one of his parents or grandparents.”

“Yes, obviously.” He smiled gently at the notion of this presenting any difficulty. “But everyone knows, of course, that Arthur is a grandson of that very eminent judge, the late Sir Walter Palgrave.”

“I cannot imagine,” I said with some asperity, “how any of you can hope to attain eminence in your profession when you are so shamefully ignorant of matters regarded as common knowledge by those whom you seek to emulate. If someone had told me yesterday that Mr. Justice Welladay was a descendant of Sir Walter Pal-grave…” I was obliged to pause, for I could not immediately think what use it would have been to me to have learnt this a day earlier.

“You would have wasted a great deal of time,” said Selena, taking rather unfair advantage of my involuntary aposiopesis, “trying-to arrange to meet him, when as it turns out he was busy chasing countesses across France and locking people up in cellars.”

We had adjourned by common consent to the first floor, where the Colonel, installed as by right of kinship at the desk usually occupied by his nephew, was continuing his perusal of the telex, chortling from time to time at those passages which evidently gave him particular satisfaction. It appeared, however, that he was not wholly inattentive to our discussion, for he now looked up from his reading.

“I say,” he said, “this Welladay you’re talking about—is he the chap that Mike calls Wellieboots?” We confirmed
that he was. “I used to know an Arthur Welladay during the war—bit of a pompous young ass—wouldn’t be the same one, would it?”

Ragwort extracted from the bookshelf behind him the latest edition of
Who’s Who
. The particulars given there of the judge’s military career established beyond question his identity with the Colonel’s wartime acquaintance.

“Well, I’m damned,” said the Colonel. “What’s young Arthur Welladay doing locking Mike up in cellars?”

“That is indeed, sir, a most interesting question,” said Ragwort. “We had at first assumed that Sir Arthur had simply gone—was merely suffering from the heavy strain of his judicial duties. But in view of the information which we have just elicited from Basil, it may perhaps be suggested that his conduct has more rational and at the same time more sinister motives.”

“I say,” said the Colonel, “you don’t mean Arthur’s the one who’s going round bumping off people who get mixed up with this Daffodil business?”

Thus simply and directly stated, the proposition was at once perceived by the young barristers to be patently absurd. Sir Arthur Welladay was one of Her Majesty’s judges and a member of Lincoln’s Inn. Whatever one might say to his discredit—and Julia at least would have been willing to say a good deal—one could not suppose him capable of killing anyone.

The Colonel looked slightly surprised.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “you can’t say that exactly, can you? I mean, he did the combined ops training at Achnacarry, so he damned well ought to know how to kill people. And you can’t say he’s never actually done it, because of course he has. Funnily enough, I think the
first time must have been on Sark—I was there, in a manner of speaking.”

They stared at him, reduced to uncustomary silence.

“Colonel Cantrip,” I said, “I think that you had better tell us the whole story.”

The events which the Colonel now recounted to us had taken place towards the end of February in the year 1944. Though recently wounded in action in North Africa, he had been considered sufficiently fit to return with his unit to England, where expectation was general of the imminent invasion of Normandy. To his evident dismay and indignation, he had found himself incarcerated (as he regarded the matter) in a military hospital in Portsmouth.

“Pretty grim sort of hellhole it was too,” said the Colonel. “The matron had X-ray eyes and could smell alcohol at five hundred yards and the medical officer was a pigheaded Scotchman who wouldn’t pass me as fit until I could dance a Highland fling three times round Ben Nevis.

“So there I was, sitting around with nothing to do except try to make enough nuisance of myself to get chucked out of the beastly place, when Squiffy Bodgem rolled in, with two bars of chocolate and a bottle of whiskey. Old mate of mine—we’d been on the same training course at Achnacarry in ’41. We’d lost touch a bit since then—turned out he’d been Portsmouth-based for quite a while, running his own commando unit. Well, I didn’t think hospital visiting was much in Squiffy’s line, specially with armfuls of whiskey and chocolates, so I asked him what he was after.

“The gist of the story was that he’d got everything lined up for a raid on Sark in ten days’ time—him and another officer and four men. He’d been quite surprised
to get the go-ahead for it, because we’d pretty much shut up shop for raiding by that time—saving everything for Normandy. But he’d managed to persuade the powers that be that Sark was a likely place for picking up a few odds and ends that might be useful to the intelligence chaps—or even a prisoner or two, which would be even better of course. Well, Squiffy thought he’d persuaded them—most probably they just reckoned it would be worth making a bit of noise in the Channel Islands and maybe bluffing the Germans into moving a few more men over there from Normandy. Whichever it was, they’d told old Squiffy he could have a go, and of course he’d been as pleased as Punch about it.

“Then he hit a snag. The idea was, you see, to hitch a lift down there on a naval submarine, get as close in as the sub could take them, and finish the journey in a collapsible landing craft. In some places that would leave you with not much to worry about from the point of view of inshore navigation—just get the Navy to point you towards land and Bob’s your uncle. Sark’s a bit different—dodgy currents and a lot of nasty rocks where you wouldn’t expect them, so if you’re landing a boat there in the dark, it’s better to know your way about a bit. No problem for Squiffy, though, because he’d got a Guernsey lad in his unit who’d been a fisherman before the war—got out the month before the Germans landed—and knew the Sark coast like the back of his hand. Then the Guernsey lad goes and makes a nonsense of a parachute jump in some training exercise and puts himself out of action, and there’s Squiffy with no navigator.

“He was just wondering if he was going to have to call the whole thing off when someone told him about me
being in Portsmouth locked up in the hellhole. He remembered me telling him I’d once spent my school holidays on Sark and done a bit of sailing there, and he thought I sounded like the answer to a maiden’s prayer. He was a bit downhearted at first when he found I still had a leg in plaster, but I pointed out that if I was only navigating I wouldn’t need to do any climbing, so it didn’t make any odds.”

“You hadn’t mentioned,” said Selena, “that your leg was still in plaster. That may perhaps explain the reluctance of the medical officer to pass you as fit.”

“if he hadn’t been so blasted pigheaded, he’d have taken it out of plaster,” said the Colonel. “Anyway, apart from that I was as fit as a flea, so I told Squiffy to count me in on the party, He wanted to make it all official to start with—you know, have me seconded to his unit for the purposes of the operation—but I talked him out of that. ‘Squiffy,’ I said, ‘once we start putting things in writing and signing them in triplicate, what’s going to happen? You know what’s going to happen,’ I said. It’s all going to end up on some chaps desk in War House. And what are the chaps in War House there for? They’re there to find out if any of us have got a bit of fun lined up and put the kybosh on it. If you try to make it official, you can kiss good-bye to me as a navigator, and probably the whole operation. Squiffy,’ I said, ‘don’t do it.’ He saw the sense of it in the end, so I stayed unofficial. Never stir up trouble when you don’t have to, that’s my motto,” said the Colonel virtuously.

Ragwort blinked.

“I managed to sneak out for a couple of training sessions, and that’s when I met young Welladay—he was the other officer in the party. Nice enough lad, just coming up to nineteen and still pretty wet behind the
ears—Squiffy was taking him along on this raid to give him a chance to see a bit of life. Terribly keen and serious he was—would keep on about freedom and justice and all that and saying that was why we’d all volunteered for combined ops. I told him I’d done it for the extra thirteen bob a day and the chance of getting eggs for breakfast, but he went all pink round the edges and wouldn’t believe me. So in the end I had to biff him, and after that we got on all right.”