At this stage, luckily, Maurice came back. I must say, he coped splendidly. Truly gifted and remarkable people, he said, very seldom get the recognition they deserve in their own time. Some of the greatest thinkers and prophets, including Socrates and the founder of the Christian Church, would quite possibly not have been given a full-page obituary in the
She stayed here all day and Griselda joined us for supper and to offer condolences. I’m afraid that by the time we’d finished I was rather longing to have the house to myself again, but it seemed wretched for Daphne to have to go back and spend the night on her own at the Rectory. The undertakers had removed the body, of course, but even so — I felt I had to ask if she’d like to sleep in the spare bedroom.
“Oh no,” she said, “I have to stay at the Rectory. If Aunt Isabella’s dead, I’m the Custodian.”
“You could go and put out food for the birds,” I said, “and then come back here.”
“Not of the birds,” she said, looking very anxious and solemn. “Of the Book. I’m the Custodian of the Book.”
So I didn’t feel I had to argue any more about it. Griselda very kindly walked back to the Rectory with her, and I went off to bed expecting to go straight to sleep.
But as you know I didn’t, and instead sat up writing you a ridiculous letter all about dirty glasses — please take no notice, it was simply because I was tired.
I woke up next morning worrying about something completely different — who was going to give the eulogy at Isabella’s funeral? You know the kind of thing I mean — a little speech about nice things she’d done and how everyone would miss her.
What really worried me was that if there was no one else Daphne might expect me to do it, and I’d have to say no. It’s all very well for Maurice — clergymen have to get used to saying things they don’t mean, just like lawyers — but I simply didn’t think I could do it.
And then I thought of Ricky. It seemed like rather a brain wave, because he’d known her longer than anyone else in Haver and was actually a friend of hers. So I rang Maurice and asked him to sound out Ricky to make sure he’d say yes if Daphne asked him to do it. Maurice said it would be better if I did the sounding out — he’d already talked to Ricky and felt that he’d like it if I got in touch.
So I rang Ricky and explained that I was helping Daphne with the funeral arrangements and there were one or two things it would be nice to discuss with him. I was really rather glad to have a reason for ringing him — I thought he might be feeling upset about Isabella and want someone to talk to, and I wouldn’t have liked him to feel he couldn’t come round and see me just because I’d been a bit cross with him. On the other hand, not being sure exactly what terms he’d been on with her, I couldn’t very well offer anything like formal condolences.
He came round bringing a bottle of Sancerre, and we sat out in the garden drinking it. I still didn’t quite know what to say about Isabella. In the end, I thought that the best thing was simply to begin by talking about the funeral arrangements, and leave it to him to say how sad he was she was dead, or whatever he wanted to say. Instead of that, he suddenly interrupted me, and said, “Reg — about those shares you thought I told her about.”
Of course I told him not to be silly — it was all water under the bridge and there was no need to mention it.
“No,” he said. “No, I want to explain — I didn’t tell Isabella about those shares.”
“Now really, Ricky,” I said, almost beginning to feel a bit impatient, because after all no one else could have done.
“I didn’t tell her about them,” said Ricky. “She told me.”
Not long after she moved here, and she and Ricky renewed their acquaintance, she’d said that she’d like to give him a present — he was a friend, and she liked to give presents to her friends. The present was simply a free prediction — the shareholders in a particular company were going to have something to celebrate within the next month — he could make as much or as little of it as he liked.
Well, Ricky couldn’t see any reason for the shares to go up, but so that she wouldn’t be offended he bought a few. A couple of weeks later there was a takeover bid, and they doubled in value almost overnight. By the time Maurice and Griselda and I asked him for his advice, this had happened three or four times and he thought that the best thing he could do for us was to give us the benefit of Isabella’s predictions.
“But look here,” I said. “You don’t actually believe that Isabella could foretell the future?” From the way he’d told me the story, it seemed to be the only explanation.
“Oh,” said Ricky, “anyone can foretell the future, if their information’s good enough.”
According to Ricky, Isabella hadn’t always been a fortune-teller. In her younger days, she was a hostess at a London nightclub which was popular at that time with businessmen and stockbrokers and so on. In the course of her conversations with customers — well yes, Julia, I think that probably is a slightly expurgated version — she learnt a great deal about what was going on in financial circles, including a lot of things that no one was supposed to know were going on and some things that weren’t supposed to be going on at all. That, in Ricky’s view, was the basis of her success as a fortuneteller.
I was surprised, if her information was as reliable as that, that she hadn’t simply used it to make money on the stock market, instead of bothering with the fortune-telling business. But she seems to have had some kind of superstition about that — she thought it would be unlucky for her to invest in shares herself, and she never did.
“But Ricky,” I said, “all this must have been at least twenty or thirty years ago. How could she still go on getting information?”
“Information’s like money,” said Ricky. “Once you’ve got it, you can use it to get more. You can buy one secret by keeping another. ‘I’m keeping your secret because you’re my friend — prove you’re my friend by telling me—’ Well, whatever it is you want.”
I thought this was all beginning to sound rather unpleasant — almost as if Isabella had been a professional blackmailer.
“Yes,” said Ricky. “That’s right. That’s what she was. There must be quite a number of people who aren’t sorry she’s dead — as a matter of fact, I’m one of them. I’ve had a pretty rotten two years of it, Reg.”
I didn’t really feel, after this, that I could ask him to deliver the eulogy.
Selena had allowed her first cup of coffee to grow cold. She ordered another and sat gazing at it with a look of judicial severity, as if it were a witness she suspected of being evasive.
“According to Madame Louisa,” said Julia, “this ought to be a good day for me to solve problems. But she doesn’t seem to mean that I can be any help with yours — knowing that Ricky Farnham’s information came from Isabella doesn’t really take you any further.”
“Oh,” said Selena, “I wouldn’t say that exactly. At least it means I know what question I’m trying to answer. I thought what I had to guess was which of the directors wanted money enough to take the risk of insider dealing. Whereas what I actually have to guess is which of them was being blackmailed by Isabella into giving her confidential information.”
“You sound quite sure that that’s what was happening.”
“How else could she have known about the shares? Unless she really did have prophetic powers, of course — but it would be rather odd, wouldn’t it, if they only applied to takeovers involving one particular investment bank?”
“But how could she make use of the information if she never invested in the stock market?”
“Oh, by selling it — that’s to say, by passing it on to one or two favoured clients in the form of a psychic prediction. But the fee, I imagine, would have been considerably larger than people usually get for crystal gazing or reading tea leaves. It’s really rather clever — it would be almost impossible to prove that any offence had been committed.”
“Well,” said Julia, “if you’d like to tell your client about Isabella, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t — it
