“Yes,” said Ragwort, “I suppose they would. It’s very comfortable and has a quite superb view of the Mediterranean.”
“And also of the roof terrace of Sir Robert Renfrew’s villa, where Selena and the directors of Renfrews’ Bank spent several days during the same period. And since we know that X must be either Albany or Bolton, it is almost inconceivable that the Reverend Maurice should not have seen him.”
From that point my reasoning became, of necessity, somewhat more speculative. I could not pretend to know precisely what thoughts had passed through the clergyman’s mind on seeing the man who a few months before had been the object of so much interest in Parsons Haver.
I imagined, however, that he had found himself in a dilemma. He realised, as we knew from his conversation with Julia at Christmas, that X’s connection with Isabella had in some way involved the crime of insider dealing; but he was uncertain of the moral gravity of the offence. To bring disgrace and punishment on someone he did not think guilty of any serious wrongdoing would have been repugnant to him. Ought he to take steps to identify X and expose him as a criminal, or should he take no action?
He would not have wanted to make an immediate decision — he needed time to reflect and perhaps seek the advice of others. Besides, he would have been reluctant to be distracted from his idyll with Terry. But he would have seen that X was merely a temporary visitor at the villa, as he himself was at Benjamin’s flat, and might leave at any moment. If he did nothing now, how would he find X again if he decided that he ought to do so? What would enable him to act later without committing him to act at once? He had his camera with him and he was an enthusiastic photographer. His solution would have been to take a photograph.
With a photograph, he could reasonably expect to have little difficulty in identifying X Once he showed it to someone familiar with people in financial circles — someone, for example, like Ricky Farnham — he had every chance of learning not only the man’s name, but enough about him to judge what action to take.
But before he could show the photographs to anyone—
“They were stolen,” said Julia.
“Crumbs,” said Cantrip, “you mean it was X who swiped them?”
“From the sequence of events that Hilary has described,” said Ragwort, “that certainly seems a reasonable conclusion.”
Selena gave a deep sigh.
“You all seem to have forgotten,” she said, “that the theft took place at night, when Terry and the Reverend Maurice were the only people in the house.”
“My dear Selena,” I said, “the security arrangements in a country Vicarage are unlikely to be comparable to those of the Bank of England. It would require, I imagine, very little skill in housebreaking to obtain entry by a downstairs window.”
“And to find what one wanted in a strange house, at night, without making a mess of anything or disturbing the occupants?”
“Maurice and Terry looked at the photographs in the study, which faces onto the street, and afterwards put them away in a drawer in the same room. Someone who had been watching through the window from the darkness outside would have had little difficulty in finding them.”
“And how would X even know that Maurice had taken his photograph or that it was anything for him to worry about?”
“A man with a crime to conceal notices when he is being watched, even more when he is being photographed. Once X discovered, as he could have done by a few very simple enquiries, that the person taking the photographs had an address in Parsons Haver, the danger would have been clear to him. You seem determined, if I may say so, to dislike my theory.”
“On the contrary,” said Selena, “I like it very much. I think it’s a perfectly charming theory. That’s why it seems such a pity that there isn’t any evidence for it.”
Selena is sometimes inclined to take a rather narrow view of what constitutes evidence: it was hardly reasonable to expect me, in all the circumstances, to provide bloodstains and fingerprints. I had not said that the matters I had referred to were conclusive; I had said merely that they were suggestive.
And, in addition, there was also the matter of Daphne’s burglary.
“Do explain, by all means, what Daphne’s burglary can possibly have to do with the matter.”
“We have been told by Terry that Isabella kept a filing cabinet, which she called her little box of secrets, containing documents which she used for the purposes of fortune-telling. And also, no doubt, for the purposes of blackmail. The filing cabinet is presumably in Daphne’s possession and still at the Rectory. If X was being blackmailed by Isabella, the filing cabinet almost certainly contains documentary evidence of whatever it was that she knew to his discredit. In short, it appears probable that the victims of the theft and of the attempted burglary both had something in their possession which X would have wished to destroy. Do you think it unduly fanciful to suggest a connection?”
“Well,” said Selena, sighing again, “if I say to myself every night before I go to sleep, ‘The frontispiece was not stolen by Terry, but by a man called X,’ I dare say I may come to believe it.”
The others, however, embraced my theory with more wholehearted enthusiasm, too pleased with it for exonerating Terry to observe that it might also have less agreeable consequences. I felt obliged to draw their attention to a further sequence of events, which if subjected to such reasoning would point to a similar but more sinister conclusion.
“We must remember,” I said, “that the loss of the photographs did not quite restore the position to what it had been before. The Reverend Maurice now knew something — that is to say, an address at which X had at least stayed for a few days — which would have given him, had he been determined to identify X, a possible avenue of enquiry. He might, for example, have written a discreetly phrased letter to the owner of the villa. In fact, however, his distress at the loss of the frontispiece drove the whole matter from his mind. We can safely assume that he took no further action until shortly before Christmas.”
“Why should we think that he did anything then?”
“A few days before Christmas he had a conversation with Julia, in which he seemed anxious to learn whether the man in the black Mercedes was guilty of a serious crime. Julia’s answers would evidently have confirmed that he was. On the following day, at the same time that Julia was posting a letter to Ragwort, the Reverend Maurice also posted a letter. On the morning that Ragwort received Julia’s letter, Sir Robert Renfrew, in the same postal area, apparently received a communication which caused him suddenly to summon his fellow directors to Cannes. I am suggesting that it was the letter posted by Maurice.”
“Oh nonsense,” said Selena. “He summoned his fellow directors because he’d decided that the time was ripe for the takeover of a company called Lupilux — as it happens, I’m working on the documents now. There’s nothing secret about that — the bid became public nearly a month ago, and has been widely commented on in the financial press.”
“I am suggesting that that was merely a pretext for the invitation. I cannot say, of course, exactly what the Reverend Maurice may have said in his letter, but it must have been enough to indicate to Sir Robert that one of his codirectors had been seen in Parsons Haver in circumstances which seemed suspicious. He naturally concluded that this had something to do with the insider-dealing business which had been worrying him for so long.”
“So he decided to get them both down to Cannes,” said Cantrip, “and then just sort of casually mention Parsons Haver and see how they reacted?”
“Something, no doubt, very much along those lines. It appears that he did not succeed in identifying the culprit — if he had, Selena would be aware of it. On the other hand, it is likely that whatever he said would have been enough to warn X of the danger. Albany and Bolton returned to England on 22nd December. On Christmas Eve the Reverend Maurice was taken ill. By the morning of Boxing Day he was dead.”
“But Maurice was at home by himself all day on Christmas Eve,” said Julia. “Hilary, you talk as if X could walk through locked doors, and come and go without anyone seeing him.”
Poor Julia is of an imaginative and superstitious disposition. I perceived that she was alarmed by the image of a nameless and faceless figure, gliding silent and unseen through the night, leaving death behind.
“My dear Julia,” I said. “I am not suggesting that X has any supernatural quality. He is invisible only in the same way as any other stranger whom you might pass in the street without taking any particular interest in. One must imagine him, of course, to be a man of some ability — not only physically agile, but quick-witted and decisive, always ready to calculate risk against opportunity.”
