“Of course not — stop pretending to misunderstand me. I think you ought to have told someone about it — someone in authority.”
“You mean the Seneschal? My dear Gideon, the Seneschal’s a busy man with many responsibilities — why would I go troubling him about a little item of lost property that I can return to the owner myself without any difficulty?”
“I’d like to know how she came to drop it there,” said Darkside, with a sort of sullen malice.
“Would you? What a thirst you must have, to be sure, for useless information.”
“And when.”
“On the way across or on the way back, if she went back before us. I don’t understand you, Gideon. What is it you want? To make people think there’s something to investigate when they’re satisfied there isn’t? Policemen seconded from London and crime reporters from the national press, all wanting the exact details of why we were on Sark and what we were talking about? I’d have thought you’d be the last person to want that, in view of what we were discussing the other evening.”
“Well,” said the accountant sulkily, “if you’re not going to say anything, then I won’t either. But it’s your decision, and I accept no responsibility for it.”
“Oh, I quite understand that,” said the Irishman. “You really must excuse me, Gideon. There are some people I’ve promised to see at lunch.”
I had been invited to lunch with the chairman and speakers, at a table where both wine and conversation were expected to flow more freely than among the paying participants. I fear, however, that I repaid the courtesy but poorly, for my mind was too much preoccupied with the conversation I had just heard to allow me to contribute much by way of gossip or argument.
Julia, I noticed, seemed now in more cheerful spirits. Either the pleasure of the encounter with Ardmore or the satisfaction of having safely delivered her lecture had evidently erased from her mind the possible necessity of emigrating to the British Virgin Islands. As we were finishing our main course, however, one of the waiters approached her and murmured something which seemed to cause her anxiety. With a rather confused apology to the chairman, she rose and left us.
A few minutes later, while we were still eating a most excellent pudding, I observed the entry to the dining room of a uniformed page boy. He approached the table where Patrick Ardmore was sitting and handed him a note. Ardmore, having read it, also rose and left. The page boy continued on his way to Darkside’s table, and a similar procedure followed, though Darkside’s response seemed somewhat more hesitant. Seeing that the page boy was now moving in my direction, I made haste to finish my pudding.
Amateurs of military anecdote will no doubt be better versed than I in the history of the Remnant Club, founded in the early nineteenth century by a group of officers, survivors of the Peninsular campaign, whose conduct had to their astonishment proved insufficiently sedate for other gentlemen’s clubs in the neighbourhood of St. James’s. Occupying as its premises an agreeable Regency town house just off Piccadilly, it has a relatively small membership, distinguished rather for gallantry than prudence, and is not much used for the entertainment of outside guests. Curiosity, if nothing else, would have compelled me to accept Colonel Cantrip’s invitation to join him there after lunch.
It was no more than five minutes’ walk from the Godolphin Hotel. A club servant of extreme antiquity, whose hobbling progress seemed to bear witness to ancient and honourable wounds, conducted me to the library — a long, oak-panelled room, smelling of leather and tobacco smoke, with shelves full of military histories and little- known memoirs.
The Colonel was sitting in a deep leather armchair looking rather pleased with himself, the demonic brightness of the eyes beneath the snow-white eyebrows undimmed by any remorse for the events of the previous evening. Facing him, at opposite ends of a long low sofa, sat Patrick Ardmore and Gideon Dark-side — the former, brandy glass in hand, giving every sign of ease and contentment, the latter with his legs stretched stiffly out in front of him in an attitude which looked to be as lacking in comfort as it was in aesthetic charm. The Colonel effected introductions and asked me what I would drink.
Although Julia was absent from the gathering, presumably detained by paramount obligations with regard to the seminar, it had plainly been contrived with her assistance, possibly even her encouragement. Quite what she had said of me to persuade the Colonel that I ought to be there, and what role he expected me to play, I could only speculate, but he evidently believed my presence indispensable to his purpose — which was, it appeared, to find out what had happened to Cantrip.
“Thing is,” said the Colonel, “I’m getting a bit worried about the lad. Been AWOL more than forty-eight hours now. Twenty-four I wouldn’t worry about, but forty-eight starts looking like trouble. Well, he’s a bit of a po-faced young blighter at times, but I wouldn’t like anything to happen to him. The girls wouldn’t like it either — I’d never hear the last of it from the girls.” His look of sudden apprehension conjured up a regiment of female Cantrip relatives bitterly reproaching him for the loss of their cherished kinsman.
“Well,” said the accountant, “I’ve always known instructing Counsel meant a lot of fuss and bother, but this is the first time I’ve been told I ought to hire a nursemaid to see him home.”
“Are we to understand,” said Ardmore, seeming at least in some measure to share the old soldier’s anxiety, “that Michael has not yet returned to London? And that you’ve had no news of him for the past two days?”
“That’s right,” said the Colonel. “Tried ringing him at home this morning — no answer. Went round to what he calls his Chambers — not a sign of him. Then I got talking to the secretary there — nice little thing — what’s her name? Lily? Eileen? Something like that.”
“I believe,” I said, “that her name is Lilian.”
“That’s right. Well, I got talking to her, and it came out she was damned worried about the boy. She’s got a soft spot for him, apparently, and I can tell you, Professor, she was nearly in tears, poor little thing. She’s heard that some pretty rum things happen to people who get mixed up with this Daffodil business, and on Monday night some chap got himself killed. She didn’t know the details, though, and there was no one else down there who knew a damn thing about anything. I knew young Julie Larwood was lunching at the Godolphin, so I thought I’d pop round there and see if she’d heard the same story. And she told me that these two gentlemen had been with Mike in the Channel Islands, so if we had a word with them, we could get the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. So here we are.”
The degree of responsibility for the Colonel’s conduct implied by the pronoun
“I might have known,” said Darkside. “I might have known that Larwood woman was at the bottom of all this nonsense. No offence, Colonel, but I’m a busy man, and quite frankly I think I’ve been brought here under false pretences. I came because you implied in your note that you could tell us something relevant to the Daffodil settlement, not to hear about a lot of silly rumours put about by a lot of silly women.”
“Colonel Cantrip,” said the Irishman, ignoring his colleague, “if I thought there was any cause for you to be worried about Michael, then I would be as concerned as you are, but I’m quite sure there is not. It’s true, I’m very sorry to say, that one of our colleagues met his death in an accident on Monday night. But if you’ll allow me to tell you about it, you’ll see that it has nothing to do with your nephew in any way at all.”
He gave the same account of Edward Malvoisin’s death that he had earlier recommended to Darkside, attributing it to an unlucky encounter with the drunken Albert in his career across the Coupee, but he delivered it now with a more unqualified conviction and the fluency of a man long practised in reassuring nervous clients of the safety of their investments. It had been, he concluded, a very tragic accident, but Cantrip had been in no way involved.
“Forgive me,” I said, “but is that entirely certain? Has either of you actually seen him since?” Had any members of Lincoln’s Inn been present they would probably have thought it helpful at this point to remind me that Cantrip had been alive and well and sending telex messages several hours after the time of the accident to the
