would have noticed long before she reached — where do we think all this happened?”
“It sounds to me,” said Ragwort, evidently making an unsuccessful effort to resist the sin of envy, “remarkably like Dourdan. It’s a charming little town between Paris and Chartres and during the Middle Ages was a favourite residence of the French royal family. There is an admirable hotel there named after Blanche of Castile, the mother, as of course you know, of the sainted Louis IX.”
I don’t say there’s any meal that I’d willingly go five hours in the boot of a Renault for, because actually there isn’t, but if there was, the one I had on Tuesday evening would probably be it. They gave me pancakes with bits of lobster in them and a sort of rabbit stew cooked with wine, and I started thinking that being an ace investigator wasn’t too bad after all.
There didn’t seem much risk of anyone going any further that night, so I nipped out to the reception desk and booked a room and got them to fix up a hired car for the next morning. I had to wave a lot of plastic of course — you can say what you like about credit cards leading people into debt, but they’re jolly useful when you haven’t got any money.
I wondered if I ought to leave a note for Gabrielle to warn her what was going on, but I thought there was too much risk of Wellieboots intercepting it. So I lurked around long enough to make sure she and her husband went upstairs before he did, in case he’d got any ideas about searching their room, and then I went to bed.
I couldn’t manage to get my paws on a telex machine, and if Henry says I ought to have rung Chambers first thing in the morning to say where I was, tell him that’s exactly the sort of fatheaded suggestion I’d expect him to make. Henry’s idea of first thing in the morning is nine-thirty, which is ten-thirty in France, and by then we’d all been on the road for more than an hour, heading for the south.
I was in a rather nifty little Peugeot, with the Mercedes ahead of me and Wellieboots tagging along behind in the Renault. I’d had this tremendously subtle idea of staying in front of him, so that he wouldn’t be suspicious about always seeing me in his rearview mirror. It meant he kept seeing me ahead of him of course, but you wouldn’t think of someone following you from the front, would you?
We were driving through one of those bits of France where the hills have vines growing all over them and the names on the signposts make you feel as if you’re driving through the wine list in a rather high-class restaurant. It makes you start thinking about lunch a lot sooner than you normally would — by twelve I was pretty peckish and by one I was simply ravenous. The signposts started featuring a town called Beaune, which somehow sounded as if it might have some nice restaurants, and I hoped we might be going there, but the Mercedes went straight past the turning. It stopped a bit further on, though, at a place with vineyards all round it and a roof made of pink tiles, which called itself the
It would have been a chance to have a quick word with Gabrielle before Wellieboots turned up, and afterwards I wished I’d taken it, but her husband still looked as if he was being a bit soppy, and I felt as if I’d sort of be barging in on a two’s-company situation. So I kept out of sight until they’d gone into the courtyard at the back, where the restaurant was. Then I went and sat in the bar, which looked out on the road, to watch for old Wellieboots.
The barman brought me the menu and a glass of blackcurrant juice — he was a youngish chap, slightly depressed-looking, as if he’d got problems or toothache or something — and reading the menu made me even hungrier. There was still no sign of old Wellieboots, and I couldn’t think what had happened to him — the Mercedes was parked in full view of the road, and not exactly what you’d call inconspicuous, so he’d have had to be pretty dim to miss it.
After a bit an oldish chap came along who seemed to be the owner and gave me some more blackcurrant juice and asked me what I’d like to eat. He was a red-faced, twinkly sort of chap, the kind you’d get to dress up in a red cloak and white whiskers for a Christmas party. Which would be a mistake, because if ever there was a chap who’d take any chance he got to chisel a starving two-year-old out of its last lollipop, it was this twinkly chap.
What gets me is that the two-faced old skuldug-gerer was so tremendously hospitable, saying what a privilege it was to have an English visitor and being sympathetic about my problems with lunch — viz whether to have the duck or the cassoulet with goose and how to make sure I’d got room for
When we started talking about what kind of wine I was going to drink, he twinkled like anything and said he’d got one or two things that were rather special and weren’t on the wine list. He wouldn’t offer them to everyone, he said, because there were some people a really fine vintage burgundy would simply be wasted on, but he could see I wasn’t one of them. So how about coming down to the cellar and tasting them, to see which I liked best?
It meant I had to stop watching out for old Wellieboots of course, but I’d more or less decided by then that he must have got lost somehow and wasn’t going to show up. I think the blackcurrant juice must have had something in it, because I’d started feeling slightly squiffy and trailing High Court judges didn’t seem as important as it had before.
So I followed him, absolutely like a lamb, along a passageway and through a trapdoor and down into the cellar.
There were a lot of bottles on racks with grilles over them and a cupboard with some glasses and a couple more bottles. He opened them both and poured me a glass from each of them, and I went on thinking how tremendously hospitable he was. Then he twinkled again and told me to take my time about tasting them while he want upstairs to see how things were going in the kitchen.
There was something about his last twinkle that reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t remember who. I was still trying to think who it was and why it somehow made me feel a bit nervous when the light went out and I heard the bolt being drawn across the trapdoor.
I yelled out, “What’s going on?” and all I got was, “Rest tranquil, my brave, rest tranquil.” I’ll make him rest tranquil all right if ever I get my hands on him, the double-crossing son of a six-headed rattlesnake.
And then someone else gave a fiendish sort of laugh, like an armadillo choking on a pineapple. I’d have recognised it anywhere, specially as the last time I heard it was when I was in the Companies Court and couldn’t remember the terms of the usual compulsory order. You’re probably not going to believe it, but I absolutely swear it was old Wellieboots.
And what I want to know is, are High Court judges allowed to lock Counsel up in cellars and, if not, what’s one supposed to do about it?
This being a question preeminently suitable for consideration by leading Counsel, it was a happy coincidence that Basil Ptarmigan should at this moment return to his room. While he removed his wig and black silk gown, accepted a cup of tea, found the papers for his next consultation, and expressed in flattering terms his pleasure at my presence, the news was conveyed to him of Cantrip’s incarceration by a member of the senior judiciary.
That Sir Arthur Welladay had power, in certain circumstances, to send Cantrip to prison seemed to Basil to be beyond dispute. If Cantrip in proceedings before him were to commit some flagrant contempt of court, as by throwing a heavy volume of the law reports at his head, the judge could quite properly instruct the tipstaff to commit him to the Tower — of that there was no doubt.
On the other hand, to encourage a French innkeeper to lock him up in a cellar, when Cantrip had done no worse than stow inoffensively away in a motorcar — a motorcar, moreover, being driven by the judge, so far as one could tell, in his private rather than his judicial capacity — was not, in Basil’s opinion, at all the same thing. He would not say that the judge had no jurisdiction to do it — it might be overaudacious, in the absence of clear authority, to go so far as that; but if he had jurisdiction then he had exceeded it; or, if he had jurisdiction and had not exceeded it, then at the very least he had exercised it in a most improper manner.
It would not do — something would have to be done. One should have a quiet word, perhaps, with someone at the Lord Chancellor’s office, where they would know the procedure for dealing with cases of this kind. It was true, of course, that many very eminent judges had continued to exercise their judicial functions with perfect competence while suffering from more or less serious forms of derangement. One had only to think of—
“Basil,” said Selena, interrupting what would undoubtedly have been a most interesting account of judicial
