“What Cantrip means is,” said Ragwort, “that your flair for research and your training in the methods of Scholarship seemed to us to make you uniquely qualified to conduct the investigation. That is what you meant, isn’t it, Cantrip?”
“Oh rather,” said Cantrip.
“And we ventured to hope,” continued Ragwort, “that by this stage of the summer term the burden of your academic duties might be less onerous than at other times of the year.”
“I’m afraid,” said Timothy, “that Julia will be quite upset if you won’t do it. She has great faith in your detective powers, you know, since that trouble she had in Venice. She often says that if it weren’t for you she might still be languishing in a dungeon under the Doge’s Palace.”
In this, as it happens, she spoke no more than the truth. When she had been suspected by the Venetian police of responsibility for a crime of passion, it had been my own investigation which had established her innocence and secured her freedom: I have written elsewhere of these events.1 A recognition of my achievement was not, however, so widespread in Lincoln’s Inn that I could be unmoved by it. Besides, for all her failings, I am fond of poor Julia, and would not wish to think of her distressed. Upon the understanding that I might look towards New Square for such assistance as their professional engagements would allow, I consented to give my mind to the question of Deirdre’s death.
Cantrip was obliged to leave us. He attends on Friday evenings at the offices of the Daily Scuttle, where it is his function to peruse the items intended for the Saturday issue of that journal and to damn to deletion those likely, in his professional opinion, to expose its proprietors to civil or criminal proceedings. Some of my readers may think that his educational disadvantages—for which, I have always said, he is rather to be pitied than blamed—would render him unsuited to such a task; but the Scuttle is fortunately one of those periodicals which eschew, so far as possible, all words of more than two syllables, so that very little of it is incomprehensible to him.
“Cantrip,” I said, “while you’re there, could you see if you can discover from your Fleet Street colleagues any further details of the evidence given at the inquest?”
“I’ll have a bash,” said Cantrip. “With lots of subtlety and discretion, of course. Toodle-pip, all of you—I’ll see you later in Guido’s.”
His departure from the Corkscrew coincided with the arrival there of Julia and Selena, both looking rather at their best. Selena wore a round-necked dress of sky-blue cotton, most becoming to herself and to the season: I remembered, seeing her, that the Courts had risen for Whitsun, and a member of the Bar could be seen in bright colors without inviting the inference of a declining practice. Julia also wore something in holiday style, of a design sufficiently dégagé to suffer little from the loss of a button or two.
It occurred to me that Julia herself was the only one of us who had had any personal acquaintance with the dead girl. Deirdre Robinson had seemed to me, from the little I had seen of her, to be peculiarly lacking in any attractive qualities; but I supposed that Julia, on the evening they had spent together, might have perceived in her client some hidden charm or talent.
“No,” said Julia sadly. “No, not really. She was, as you say, very plain, and rather dull, and she didn’t seem to like anyone very much. But I still think it matters if someone pushed her off the roof.” Julia spoke as if expecting contradiction. “One’s protection from acts of violence doesn’t depend, in a civilized society, on being talented or attractive or making people like one. It depends on the law. That, as I understand it, is the distinguishing characteristic of civilization: to protect those one likes or loves is no more than the merest barbarian might do.”
“No doubt,” said Timothy. “But why should the whole burden of defending civilization and the rule of law fall on the members of New Square?”
“I would suggest,” said Julia, absent-mindedly flicking her cigarette ash into her wineglass, “that those of us who have made the law our study and our profession have a more than ordinary responsibility to uphold the principles upon which it rests. It is a responsibility acknowledged in the traditions of the English Bar and the rules which govern our conduct. One can’t refuse to act for someone, for example, because one dislikes or disapproves of them.”
“No,” said Timothy. “One can’t pick and choose one’s clients.”
“Because otherwise there would be people who could find no one to represent them, and would be prevented from defending or enforcing their rights: the law would be applied for the benefit of some and not of others, and this would be inconsistent with the principles on which it is based. If the law is personal and partial in its application; if it defends only strength and restrains only weakness; if it varies and veers and wavers to meet the demands of power or the expediency of the moment—then it no longer has the quality of law: our civilization is built on sand, and we slide back before we realize it into that state of Nature in which, as we are told, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Selena. “These are very proper sentiments, Julia, and do you credit. Do you feel better now?”
Julia, however, continued for some time after this to discourse on the high principles and noble traditions for which Sir Thomas More had gone to the scaffold and Erskine May had resigned high office. I blame for this sort of thing the authors of the Guide to Professional Conduct which is handed out wholesale to all those called to membership of the English Bar: they have seen fit to include in it a number of sensational and romantic tales about barristers behaving well and acting on principle and so forth; and have too little considered, in my opinion, what effect these may have on impressionable persons such as Julia, who misunderstand things and take it all seriously.
“My dear Julia,” I said at last, “do not distress yourself further about these matters. I have consented to undertake the inquiry, and there is no need for you to worry any more about civilization or the rule of law or what Sir Thomas More would have done. Sir Thomas will understand that you have done your best, and when civilization crumbles it will not be your fault at all. It is only fair to tell you, however, that I shall engage in the investigation without sharing your belief that it is a case of murder.”
She gave me a look of polite but distrustful inquiry, as if suspecting me of a wish to evade my task or excuse in advance a lack of zeal in its performance.
“Don’t you see,” I said, “that it’s the wrong girl who’s dead?”
Murder is unusual. The irritations, disappointments, envies and desires of everyday life are generally resolved in some manner less extreme. When it occurs, then, or is thought to have occurred, there must be looked for to account for it some unusual feature in the surrounding circumstances—some unusual wrong to be avenged, some unusual passion to be assuaged, some unusual advantage to be obtained.
A personal fortune of five million pounds is unusual. To gain possession of it, it is conceivable that someone might behave in a manner quite contrary to custom and convention. At a gathering, therefore, of the descendants of Sir James Remington-Fiske a murder would be not wholly unaccountable.
But one would expect it to be the heiress who was murdered.
“Camilla, however, lives and flourishes, and the supposed victim of your imagined crime is the insignificant poor relation. The rich, my dear Julia, commit many wrongs against the poor; but they seldom murder them, and hardly ever for gain.”
Julia sat silent in the candlelight, perceiving the force of my argument but unpersuaded by it.
“Moreover,” I continued, “it cannot be said that Deirdre’s death is mysterious or unexplained. There has been an inquest and evidence has been given and the Coroner is satisfied that it was an accident. The probability surely is that he is right?”
“Oh, but he can’t be.” It was Selena who answered, surprising me by her firmness. “However Deirdre came to fall from the roof at Rupert’s flat, it can’t have happened in
die way the Coroner thought. Julia and I have been there, you see, and we know it can’t. I think we had better tell you—if Timothy and Ragwort don’t mind hearing it again—the story of the Grateful Client.”
1 Thus Was Adonis Murdered
CHAPTER 4
The story of the Grateful Client had its beginning in November of the previous year, when Selena received instructions from Tancred’s to appear in a possession action in the Wandsworth County Court. The lay client was Rupert Galloway, whose landlords were seeking to forfeit the lease of his penthouse for an alleged breach of the covenant not to use it for any profession or business. Rupert admitted that the penthouse had become the registered office of Galloway Opportunities Limited, a company of which he was the managing director, and that the company’s affairs were conducted from that address; but he denied, and wished Selena to deny on his behalf, that this amounted to a breach of the covenant.
“What opportunities,” I asked, “does this company provide?”
“You could say,” said Selena, “that it gives those wishing to invest in commodity futures the opportunity to take advantage of Rupert’s expertise—that’s how Rupert puts it. Or you might say that it gives Rupert the opportunity to speculate with other people’s money. It’s a question of how you look at it.”
She had thought the case difficult but not hopeless. There were, she proposed to argue, two distinguishing features which characterized the carrying on of a business—the attendance of customers and the employment of staff; if these were absent, there would be no breach of covenant. She assumed, and Rupert confirmed, that his clients did not come in person to the penthouse to buy and sell cocoa futures. As to employing staff—she had asked Rupert specifically whether he employed anyone to assist him with the company’s affairs, and he had firmly assured her that he did not: his daughter sometimes helped out by typing a few letters for him, and one of his girlfriends did the same thing; but that, he said, was all.
When, therefore, it was revealed in evidence on the first day of the hearing that a young lady, identified by the diligence of the landlords’ inquiry agent as being on the books of a leading secretarial agency, had visited the penthouse from 10 o’clock in the morning until 1 o’clock in the afternoon on three days a week for a period of months, Selena was rather cross.
“Cross,” said Julia, “is not quite the word. You expressed the desire, on your return to Lincoln’s Inn, to boil your client in oil and feed him very slowly to man-eating piranha fish.”
Reproached for his duplicity, her client had claimed that the young lady from the secretarial agency was in fact the girlfriend whom he had mentioned, and had sought to imply, by various winks and leers, that the purpose of her visits was more amorous than secretarial. It seemed to Selena, however, that their regularity was uncharacteristic of a romantic association.
“On the basis of our own experience,” said Ragwort, “I should have thought it even more uncharacteristic of an agency typist.”
Selena had spent an evening intended for better things in revising her closing speech to accommodate in her definition of non-business use the employment of a part-time secretary. She had felt, on concluding her labors, quite pleased with the result, and when she delivered the speech on the following day had thought that the judge listened not unfavorably. On the day fixed for judgment, however, she had found herself engaged in the High Court, which naturally took precedence over the Wandsworth County Court. Julia, having no unalterable commitments on that day, was prevailed on to take her place.
Finding Wandsworth County Court was an enterprise, according to Julia’s account of it, of more or less equivalent difficulty to tracing the source of the Blue Nile; but she had surmounted the rigors of the journey, and arrived, albeit flushed and breathless, in time to take the judgment—which was, of course, in Rupert’s favor.
“I wouldn’t have thought,” said Timothy, “that there was any ‘of course’ about it—it sounds like a very near thing.”
“When Selena tells us,” said Julia, “that she was quite pleased with her closing speech, we may safely conclude that it was the finest piece of advocacy ever heard in south-west London—our success was not in doubt. All that remained for me to do was to bow and ask for costs, and be taken to lunch by the lay client.”
“This last,” said Ragwort, “was not among your professional duties.”
“Not in the narrow sense—but these little gestures of gratitude on the part of the lay client do not occur so commonly that one ought to discourage them. It was unfair, of course, that Selena should have done all the work and I should have the lunch; but it seemed better that Rupert should buy lunch for me than that he should not buy it for anyone. And it is fair to say that it was a very good lunch at a rather attractive little French restaurant in Putney.”
While giving him credit, however, for the excellence of the meal, she had thought him unduly complacent about his success, which he seemed to attribute rather to the merits of his case than to the brilliance of his Counsel. He confessed to having felt some anxiety when his solicitors entrusted the case to a young lady, but he had to admit, he said, that Miss Jardine had done it very nicely—
Julia, recounting this, choked on her Niersteiner.
—very nicely, he said, though of course it was a very simple and straightforward case, and the landlords had had no chance of winning: when one looked properly at the evidence, as Miss Jardine herself had pointed out to the judge, they really had no case at all. Still, she had done it very nicely. Recalling the care of Selena’s preparation and Rupert’s own unhelpfulness towards success, Julia had thought it right to make clear to him that but for his good fortune in being represented by one of the most persuasive advocates in Lincoln’s Inn he would even then have been seeking accommodation on the Thames Embankment; and had added that that, in Julia’s opinion, would have been a just reward for his ingratitude.
“It was kind of you to say that,” said Selena, turning her glass thoughtfully between her fingers. “I shouldn’t like you to think that I don’t appreciate it. Although as things turned out—”
Startled by the vehemence of her indignation, Rupert had remarked that she seemed to be a great admirer of Selena’s; to which Julia answered that indeed she was, for to know Selena and not to admire her was a thing impossible.
“Julia,” said Ragwort, “have you no sense at all?” A foolish question, since he knows she has not.
“Julia was not to know,” said Selena, “that Rupert is a rather—unsophisticated sort of person.”
The lunch had thereafter proceeded amiably. At its conclusion Rupert had invited Julia to bring Selena to a little party he was holding at the end of the following week; it would be the sort of thing, he said, that he thought they might find amusing.
She had attached, at the time, no particular significance to these words or the manner in which they were said.
“I believe we have reached a part of the narrative,” said Timothy, “which may not be suitable hearing for the Revenue silks whom I see gathered at the next table. Shall we adjourn to Guido’s?”
No more was said, as we walked along Kingsway in the warm May evening, of the affair of the Grateful Client. Not until we were comfortably installed in Guido’s and all necessary choices had been made between asparagus and tagliatelli, grilled sole and scampi Nizzarda, Valpolicella and Frascati, did Selena resume her narrative.
“Thinking,” said Selena, “that if Rupert wished further to express his gratitude in the form of food and drink it would be unkind of us to discourage him, we made our way on the appointed evening to his penthouse in Mortlake. It is on the fifth floor of a rather elegant block of flats close to Barnes Bridge, with a view across the river to Duke’s Meadows. The door was opened by a red-haired girl, quite substantially built, wearing a black dress and black stockings and a little white pinafore.”
“In brief,” I said, “an old-fashioned parlormaid.”
“Your ‘in brief’ is appropriat
e, your ‘old-fashioned’ less so. When I say she was wearing stockings rather than tights, I do not speak from surmise. I am able to add, again without surmise, that they were secured by a black lace suspender belt. You may conclude that the dress was very brief indeed.”
“Quite disgraceful,” said Ragwort.
“We hung up our coats and she led us into the drawing-room. It was a nice spacious drawing-room, the result, I imagine, of knocking two rooms into one, with a balcony and French windows on the side looking on to the river. The furnishing was of the sort designed to be recognized as opulent—Wilton carpets and leather sofas and so forth.”
“If I may say so,” said Julia, “it was not the quality of the furniture which most immediately engaged one’s attention. It was the presence in the room of a number of people with no clothes on.”
“Yes,” said Selena a little reproachfully. “Yes, Julia, I was coming to that. Ah good, here’s the asparagus.”
“You should have left forthwith,” said Ragwort, “pausing, if at all, only to utter a brief denunciation.”
“It was possible,” said Julia, “that Rupert meant well and did not intend us to be disconcerted. In which case, we would not have wished to appear so.”
“And even more possible,” said Selena, “that he did not mean well at all and intended us to be very disconcerted. In which case still less would we have wished to appear so. Moreover, we had travelled halfway across London in an inconvenient direction to enjoy his hospitality, and I at least did not intend to leave until I had my money’s worth. We accepted the champagne offered us by the parlormaid person, and sat down on one of the sofas to consider our position. Julia was afraid that we might be committing some kind of solecism by not taking our clothes off; but I thought we could regard the occasion as one at which dress was optional. So we kept them on.”
The Shortest Way to Hades Page 5
