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
“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.
