“Toadsbreath, my good man,” said Cecilia Mainwaring, raising her superbly groomed eyebrows, “I have already told you that I know no more than you do of the present whereabouts of my learned friend Mr. Carruthers, and it becomes you very ill, Toadsbreath, to doubt my word on the matter. I go so far as to say that it is the height of impertinence.”
“Beg pardon, Miss Mainwaring,” mumbled Toadsbreath, respectfully tugging his forelock. “I didn’t mean no harm.”
Cantrip, on the following morning, was still absent from the customary gathering in the coffeehouse. He had not returned to Chambers, nor had any further communication been received from him. Suspecting Julia, as his co-author and habitual confidante, of knowing more of the matter than she chose to admit, Henry had interrogated her (said Julia) in a manner somewhat less deferential than could properly have been adopted by an infant-school teacher towards a delinquent six-year-old.
Save in that respect, however, the boy’s continued absence occasioned no anxiety among his friends. The Channel Islands are a delightful place to be during the first week in May, and a more conscientious young man than Cantrip might have yielded to the temptation to extend his visit.
It was judged imprudent, in view of the circumstances — that is to say, the uncertain state of Henry’s temper — for Ragwort and Selena to linger over coffee. Arranging to meet again in the Corkscrew for lunch, we all walked together to New Square. I had already said my farewells and turned on my way towards the Public Record Office, eager to devote myself once more to the gentle service of Scholarship, when Lilian came running down the steps of 62, calling out to me to wait for a moment.
“Oh, Professor Tamar,” she said, rather charmingly breathless, “Miss Derwent was on the telephone. She rang to ask if Mr. Cantrip was back in Chambers yet. And when I said he wasn’t, she asked about you — if I happened to know if you were in London at the moment. So of course I said you were and you’d probably be looking into Chambers sometime this morning. And she said, if I saw you, would I please ask you to ring her as soon as possible.”
The message perplexed me. I had no personal acquaintance with Clementine Derwent and could imagine no reason why she should wish to speak to me.
The telephone call which I made from Selena’s room a few minutes later afforded but little enlightenment. The matter, it seemed, was of some complexity, and could not satisfactorily be explained at a distance. Clementine’s office was in the Gray’s Inn Road, no more than five minutes’ walk away. If in the course of the day I could find time to visit her there, she would be most grateful.
Those who believe, as most members of Lincoln’s Inn are inclined to do, that any serious study of the law requires an atmosphere of dust and antiquity would have been unfavourably impressed by the offices of Messrs. Stingham and Grynne. The thickness of the carpets, the subtlety of the lighting, the freshness of the flowers arranged in cut-glass bowls — all these would have caused them grave doubts of the soundness of the advice provided there. On the other hand, these features did seem to indicate that a passable number of reasonably prosperous clients were not dissatisfied.
The room occupied by Clementine Derwent on the third floor of the building, though presumably not so large as those allotted to full partners in the firm, was nonetheless sufficiently spacious and well appointed, with a view eastwards to the domes and spires of the City, to be suggestive of rapid advancement. She rose to greet me, leaning across her desk to offer me her hand.
Her full-skirted cotton dress was drawn neatly in at the waist, and her glossy black hair was cut, I daresay at great expense, in a style of becoming softness. Neither of these measures could quite disguise her resemblance in face and figure — the former round, snub-nosed, good-humouredly pugnacious, the latter trim and muscular — to an engaging but undisciplined schoolboy. It would have seemed inapt to call her pretty — the epithets she brought to mind were those descriptive of a crisp eating apple.
A sensible, well-balanced young woman, one would have said at first sight, who would not readily allow any personal or professional difficulty to weigh so excessively on her mind as to interfere with sound sleep and healthy appetite. I was surprised, therefore, as she resumed her place at her desk, to observe in her unmistakable signs of tension and anxiety.
’Professor Tamar,” she said, with a nervous abruptness which I could not think characteristic of her, “I hope you don’t think it’s awfully peculiar of me to ask you round here. I’m a friend of Michael Cantrip, you see, and he’s talked a bit about you. I’ve got a problem that I hoped you might be willing to help with.”
My perplexity deepened, and did not diminish when she began to tell me of the existence and provisions of the Daffodil Settlement. It seemed tactless to mention, since she repeatedly stressed the confidentiality of the matter, that I was already aware of them. I would not have wished her to form an unfavourable view of Can-trip’s capacity for discretion.
“So you see,” she concluded, “if the worst comes to the worst — I mean if we can’t find the letter of wishes and can’t find out who the real settlor was — then we’re going to have to give the whole fund to the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave. It’s idiotic, of course, because no one ever meant them to get a penny of it, but it looks as if we’ll have no choice. And we’ve been advised by Chancery Counsel — well, by Canters, actually — that we’d better try and find out who they are. So I wondered if you’d be interested. I mean, you are a legal historian.”
I could scarcely forbear to smile, for the notion was of course absurd. The tracing of missing relatives, with all respect to the no doubt very estimable persons accustomed to undertake such enquiries, can hardly be regarded as a branch of Scholarship. Recalling, however, that Clementine, like Cantrip, had spent her formative years at Cambridge, where such distinctions are perhaps but imperfectly understood, I sought some way to explain without wounding her that such an investigation would be inappropriate to my academic standing and qualifications.
’I’m afraid,” she continued, “that my clients will want the fee to be calculated on a time-costed basis. Would you consider doing it for sixty pounds an hour?” I suppose that my expression indicated surprise. It had not occurred to me, such is my innocence in these matters, that she would offer any pecuniary inducement. She looked apologetic. “Plus expenses, of course. I’m sorry, I know it’s not terribly generous.”
I found myself obliged to reconsider the matter. By the modest standards of the unworldly Scholar, the offer seemed not ungenerous; and yet, were I now to decline it, she could not but think that my reason was the inadequacy of the financial reward. I could not endure to be suspected of so grasping and sordid a motive: I indicated that I would undertake the investigation on the terms she had proposed.
“Tell me,” I said, “is there anything you already know about the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave, or am I to begin, as it were, with a clean slate?”
The question unaccountably caused her to blush.
“Well, Sir Walter Palgrave himself was a judge, of course — end of the nineteenth century. I expect you know lots more than I do about him.” As a student chiefly of the mediaeval period, I could not truthfully claim any extensive knowledge of the Victorian judiciary, but I realised why the name had seemed faintly familiar. “I got a copy of his will from the Probate Registry. It looks from that as if he left six daughters, so the people we’re looking for are probably their children or grandchildren. But the will only gives their Christian names, so I’m afraid it doesn’t get us very far.”
“No matter,” I said, “it provides a starting point. You know nothing else that might be relevant?”
“Well’—she blushed again—“not officially. I mean, I haven’t told anyone else about it.” She hesitated. I adopted an expression, as I hoped, of sympathetic encouragement. “You see, a few months ago I got engaged. To a chap,” she added helpfully, as if supposing me unaware that when a young woman becomes engaged it is customarily to a young man. “He’s a solicitor as well — his name’s Peter. Well, one evening we happened to start talking about the way the law seems to run in families. You know — the same names keeping on cropping up in the law reports over a couple of centuries. So I asked him if there were any other lawyers in his family. And he said there wasn’t anyone close, but his grandmother had been a daughter of Sir Walter Palgrave.”
I began to understand her embarrassment. For a solicitor to continue to advise in a matter in which her prospective husband had a financial interest would be, I readily perceived, of dubious propriety.
“I suppose the Law Society would say that I either ought to chuck Peter or chuck handling the Daffodil Settlement. But I’m jolly well not going to chuck Peter, because he’s awfully nice. And Daffodil’s the biggest thing I’ve ever dealt with on my own, so I don’t want to chuck that either.”
It was a sad dilemma. A Victorian novelist, I daresay, could have done something very remarkable with the story of such a conflict between love, duty, and ambition. It seemed to me, all the same, not quite sufficient to account for the signs of tension and anxiety which I had observed in her. I inquired if she had told her fiancé of the problem.
“Oh, absolutely not — that would make it all much worse. I did try to sound him out a bit about the state of the family, but I didn’t get very far. He’s an only child and so was his mother — Sir Walter Palgrave’s granddaughter. But she died quite a long time ago, and she never seems to have talked to him about any aunts or cousins.”
She opened a filing cabinet beside her desk and withdrew from it a long manila envelope.
“There’s a copy of Sir Walter Palgrave’s will in here and a short note of what Peter’s told me. I’m afraid that’s all the help I can give you.” She handed me the envelope. “I don’t suppose — I don’t suppose you can tell me how long it’s going to take to track these people down, but you will try and do it as soon as possible, won’t you? I — my clients are anxious to know where they stand.”
I assured her that I would begin my researches at once and proceed with such expedition as the nature of the task might permit. Our conversation seemed to be at an end. Clementine thanked me for my assistance with a bright smile and an undertone in her voice of some emotion which I did not immediately recognise. I was already rising from my chair when I identified it as disappointment.
One becomes accustomed in academic life to the unreasonableness of the young. They desire not merely to be understood, but to be understood by telepathy; not merely to be permitted to tell their troubles, but to be prevailed on to do so. The more care they take to conceal their feelings, the greater their disillusionment if one fails to discover them.
“My dear girl,” I said, adopting the formula which I have found serviceable in such cases, “would it not be more sensible to tell me what is really the matter?”
“I don’t know why you should think,” said Clementine, looking down at her desk, “that there’s anything else.”
“We are dealing, as I understand it, with the sort of discretionary trust which could quite properly remain in existence for many years. The trust fund is safe, as I suppose, in the hands of the trustees and ex hypothesi no one is pressing for a distribution. No doubt it is desirable to identify the default beneficiaries, but most solicitors, if I may say so, would be content in those circumstances to proceed at a fairly leisurely pace. You are behaving, however, as if tracing the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave were a matter of considerable urgency. Wouldn’t it be better to tell me why?”
She continued for some moments to stare down silently at her desk, her head between her hands, as if uncertain how, if at all, to answer me.
“I suppose,” she said at last, “because I think that one of them’s probably a murderer.”
It was plain that something serious had happened in the Channel Islands. Not without some effort of will, I listened patiently while she unfolded those parts of the story with which, unknown to her, I was already familiar: the odd circumstances surrounding the death in the Cayman Islands of Oliver Grynne; Gabrielle’s suspicion that she was being followed; and the events which had led to the professional advisers to the Daffodil Settlement spending the previous Monday night on the island of Sark.
Had I thought that her narrative might culminate in any misadventure to poor Cantrip, I could not have refrained from interrupting to ask news of him; but I recalled that she had enquired for him earlier that morning in Chambers, apparently expecting him to have returned safely to London.
When she reached the events of Monday evening, I saw her hesitate, plainly deliberating what limits should be set to her candour. Discretion apparently prevailed — she left me to assume that after dinner she had retired to the respectable solitude of her own room.
On the following morning she had breakfasted in the hotel dining room in the company of Ardmore and Darkside. The waitress who served them gave them also a full account of the misadventures of Albert, as a result of which the road across the Coupee was blocked by the overturned carriage. They had remained in the dining room to await news of its removal, neither curious nor concerned as to the precise whereabouts of the rest of the party.
Soon after nine o’clock they were told that the Coupee was clear again, but the next boat for Guernsey did not sail until noon, and there seemed no merit in haste. The three of them, therefore, were still in the dining room when Philip Alexandre brought the bad news.
Two fishermen sailing along the eastern coast of the island had seen a body lying on the rocks below the Coupee. They had managed with some difficulty to take it on board their boat, conscientiously marking with an impromptu flag the place where it had lain. On reaching harbour, they had sent an urgent message to the Constable, the member of the Sark community responsible, under the authority of the Seneschal, for the maintenance of public order.
The Constable had recognised the dead man at once as a frequent visitor to the island, and had known that Philip Alexandre was the person with whom he most commonly had dealings. It was the Jersey advocate Edward Malvoisin.
“Of course,” said Clementine, leaning back with a deep sigh, “it could have been an accident. So could Oliver Grynne getting drowned. But that means there’ve been two fatal accidents within six months to people connected with the Daffodil Settlement, and it struck me as a bit over the odds. I couldn’t think what to do about it, though. I’ve nothing solid enough to go to the police with. And anyway, the clients would have fits — you know what Swiss bankers are like about secrecy. And then I thought of you, Professor Tamar. I remembered one or two things that Cantrip had said about you and about that problem Julia had in Venice and I thought — well, I thought that if you were involved in the case perhaps you might come across something.”
“It is true,” I said, “that I have had some little success in applying the methods of Scholarship to one or two somewhat similar matters.” I was touched and rather surprised that the boy should have spoken to her of these achievements. They had not always seemed to me to receive in New Square the degree of recognition which an unprejudiced observer might think them to deserve. “I trust, however, that Cantrip has not given you an exaggerated notion of my abilities — there is nothing miraculous about them.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Clementine. “What he said was — well, what he actually said was that you were awfully good at picking up odds and ends of gossip and finding out things that weren’t any of your business.”
Making allowances for the Cambridge idiom, I supposed I must consider it a tribute. I enquired whether she had spoken of her fears to any of her colleagues.
“No — I didn’t have a chance to talk to Patrick in private, and Gideon Darkside’s the last person that I’d want to discuss it with. And I haven’t seen Cantrip or Gabrielle at all since it happened. We didn’t have time to look for them, you see — the Constable wanted us to go straight over to the harbour and confirm the identification, and anyway, Philip Alexandre seemed to think that they’d probably gone on ahead of us. So somehow or other we all missed each other — I think they must both have left Sark without hearing the news about Edward.”
I knew that Cantrip had not yet returned to Chambers; the Contessa also, it seemed, was still absent from her office in Monte Carlo.
“I tried ringing her there this morning, and she wasn’t back yet. But you see, Professor Tamar, I didn’t really expect her to be. She’d been meaning to meet her husband somewhere near Paris and spend two or three days driving south with him. She says he gets fed up when she goes off on business trips, so she always tries to make up for it by having a short holiday on her own with him afterwards.” Clementine smiled indulgently at this matrimonial bargaining. “If she left Sark without hearing about poor old Edward, then there’s no reason for her to have changed her plans. I’m not really worried about her.” I perceived, however, that this last was not entirely true.
“Your reasoning,” I said, “is not as yet entirely clear to me. I quite appreciate that the descendants of Sir Walter Palgrave, if of a mercenary disposition, would wish to ensure that the identity of the settlor was never discovered and that the trust company was therefore unable to exercise its discretion in accordance with his wishes. You tell me, however, that of all those concerned with the settlement, your late senior partner, Oliver Grynne, was the only one who knew the identity of the settlor. So far as his death is concerned, the Palgrave descendants have a motive — but what motive do they have for disposing of Edward Malvoisin?”
“I’m afraid,” said Clementine apologetically, “that it’s not quite as simple as that. You see, when I say that Oliver was the only one who knew who the settlor was, I don’t exactly mean that the others didn’t know. Well, not exactly. What I mean is — well, that they did sort of know, but they’d — well, sort of forgotten.”
“Forgotten?” I said. Though I have no personal experience of such matters, I would have supposed that the establishment of a trust fund in excess of nine million pounds sterling would infallibly ensure that one’s name lived, if not in history, at least in the memory of one’s accountants and investment advisers. “Forgotten?”
“Well, Professor Tamar, what you’ve got to remember is that back in the early seventies the Edelweiss company in Jersey was setting up settlements like this by the barrel load. Patrick and Gabrielle were both there then, and between them they probably did several hundred a year — mostly in the couple of months before the Budget. You couldn’t expect anyone to remember off the cuff which settlement was whose. And there wasn’t anything special about Daffodil. It’s a bit special now, of course, because Gabrielle did some rather brilliant things with the investments and the settlor never seems to have wanted much out of it, so it’s built up into quite a tidy sum. But when it started it was quite an ordinary size of fund — a few hundred thousand quid.”
I endeavoured to appear suitably contemptuous of so inconsiderable a sum.
“Each settlement would have been given a name — the year they did Daffodil they were all called after flowers — and the documents and correspondence relating to it would have been filed under that name. And they’d be awfully careful to see that the settlor’s name was never mentioned anywhere on the file, because the whole idea was that if the file got into the wrong hands, there still wouldn’t be anything to show who’d really made the settlement. But there’d be a code number on the file corresponding to a number on an index at the bank’s office in Geneva, which would give you the name of the settlor. It’s a tremendously sophisticated system.”
“And completely foolproof, no doubt.”
“Oh, absolutely. Well, it would be, except that the Daffodil file’s somehow lost its code number. I suppose someone’s secretary decided to replace the folder and didn’t realise how important it was to copy the number on the cover.”
“I see,” I said. “But are you sure that Oliver Grynne had not also forgotten who the settlor was?”
“Oh yes, Professor Tamar, there’s no doubt about that. The settlor was one of Oliver’s personal clients, and it was Oliver who advised him to make the settlement and did all the arrangements. And naturally he went on being the contact man between the settlor and everyone else involved. It was through Oliver that they got the news that the settlor had died — he made an announcement about it on the first day of their meeting in the Cayman Islands.”
“But in all the years since the settlement was made, did he never once mention the name of the settlor? And did it never once occur to any of the others to ask him what it was?”
“Well no. You see, Professor Tamar, in the tax-planning business one rather gets in the habit of not using the client’s name, even in private, unless one absolutely has to — walls have ears, and all that. And none of the others would exactly have thought that they didn’t know who the settlor was — they’d have thought they did know, but just couldn’t remember offhand. Like a telephone number that one’s got somewhere in one’s address book. It wasn’t until several weeks after Oliver died that we realised—”
“That you had, as it were, lost the address book?”
“Yes. I thought to begin with, when I found the name wasn’t mentioned on Oliver’s Daffodil file, that all I had to do was go through all his files for his personal clients and I’d be sure to spot the right person. Well, I’ve done that and not found anything. But of course that’s all we’ve done so far — go through files in our various offices. I’m certainly not advising my clients to throw the sponge in at this stage. If everyone who was involved in Daffodil when it was set up really gets down to work on it — you know, going through their personal diaries and old letters so on, and working out exactly what they were doing and who they were meeting at the time — then I think that between them they’re practically bound to remember something that leads us to the right answer.” Her schoolboyish face, which had brightened with enthusiasm for this energetic enterprise, was clouded again by anxiety. “The trouble is, it looks to me as if someone else thinks the same thing.”
“Were all those now professionally concerned with the settlement involved in its setting up?”
“Yes — except me of course. I didn’t come into it until after Oliver died. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily had any direct contact with the settlor. Edward Malvoisin would have been responsible for preparing the trust deed, because theoretically it was a Jersey settlement. But he’d have used a draft provided by Oliver, and probably drafted by Counsel in London, to make sure it did the right things from the point of view of U.K. tax law. And he’d have got his instructions through the trust company, so there wouldn’t have been any need for him actually to meet the settlor.”
“And how did Gideon Darkside come into the picture?”
“Well, I suppose Oliver thought there ought to be an accountant involved and he brought in Gideon. We used to have quite a close relationship with Gideon’s firm in those days — they still had one or two people who actually knew something about tax, and Gideon was still relatively junior, so no one realised what a dead loss he was. I suppose it’s quite lucky that Daffodil’s the only case where we’re still lumbered with him. I’d expect Oliver to have introduced him to the settlor, but Gideon claims he can’t remember anything about it. And of course his idea of efficiency is to destroy all documents wholesale when they’re more than six years old, so there’s nothing at all on his files.”
“The settlor, I suppose, would have wished at some stage to meet a senior representative of the company which was to be entrusted with his money — Patrick Ardmore or the Contessa?”
“Oh,” said Clementine, with the expression of a schoolboy about to disclose some lively item of gossip about the headmaster, “Patrick may have dealt with some of the paperwork, but the meeting would quite definitely have been with Gabrielle. Poor old Oliver was absolutely potty about her, you see, so there’s no way he’d have passed up an excuse to set up a meeting with her. I think that’s why he hung on to the Daffodil case — he ought really to have handed it over to someone a bit more junior, but that would have meant not seeing her at Daffodil meetings.” Her smile faded again. “So if anyone’s going to remember anything about the settlor, Gabrielle’s the most likely person. And that’s why — I don’t exactly mean I’m worried about her, Professor Tamar, but I’d be awfully pleased to know for certain that she really is safely on her way home with her husband.”
Reflecting on what she had told me, I found myself suffering from a curious confusion of mind, of the kind which might be induced by some mild hallucinogen — the inevitable consequence, I suppose, of having anything to do with the world of international tax planning. Clementine’s theories seemed at one moment entirely absurd and fanciful; at the next, utterly persuasive.
“I suppose,” I said eventually, “that there will be an inquest on Edward Malvoisin?”
“The body’s been sent over to Guernsey for an autopsy. The Guernsey CID will report back to the Seneschal of Sark and he’ll hold an inquest. If there are no signs of violence, I suppose the verdict will be accidental death.”
“Is it known from what point he fell? Was it from the Coupee itself or could it have been from somewhere on Little Sark?”
“No, he must have fallen from somewhere near the middle of the Coupee. I saw the place on the way back — the fishermen had marked it with a flag.”
“And they saw the body, as I understand it, while the entrance to the Coupee from Little Sark was still blocked by the overturned carriage. If that is right, then he must have left Little Sark sometime on the previous evening, before Albert’s accident. But he was still in the bar, you say, when you retired for the night at about quarter past ten. It seems a rather eccentric hour to go out for a walk along the cliffs on a dark and windy night. Have you any idea why he went?”
“No — no idea at all,” said Clementine. It seemed to me, however, that she had hesitated, as she had done before when deciding to be something less than candid.
“Is there any possibility that he might have committed suicide?”
“Oh no, Professor Tamar, not with Edward. Poor Edward, he may not have been popular with everyone, but he was always popular with himself.”
“It could still have been an accident, however. Were it not for the previous death, you would suspect nothing more sinister.”
“I suppose not,” said Clementine. “But I don’t actually see how it could have happened. Edward was quite heavily built, and the railings would have come up to his waist. If he’d simply stumbled, they’d have stopped him going over the edge. If he’d been leaning over them, I suppose he might have overbalanced, but why on earth should he lean over, specially in the pitch dark? I just don’t see how it could have happened, unless…” She shivered and looked towards the window, as though seeing in the distance beyond not the sunlit thoroughfares of the City but the remote and desolate clifftop, which played, as I now recalled, so prominent and sinister a role in the folklore of Sark.
“Unless?”
“Unless there was something there he was so afraid of that he climbed over the railings to escape it.”
I experienced again a sensation of coldness. I was seized at that moment, for no reason rationally explicable, by a curious conviction that the death of Edward Malvoisin had nothing at all to do with such modern and sophisticated things as settlements and companies but with something altogether darker and more ancient.