The Shortest Way to Hades (11 page)

“I understood,” I said, “that the verdict was accident.”

“It couldn’t have been an accident,” said the boy. “The wall around the terrace is too high to fall from by accident.”

“But you say that your cousin behaved as if she were in good spirits?”

“I say that she behaved, Professor Tamar, as if she expected to be the center of attention and make us all wish we’d have been nicer to her. Yes. How else could she have done that except by killing herself?” He turned towards me again, looking at me with his curious lapis lazuli eyes; and what he said seemed for a moment quite reasonable and persuasive.

I thought it idle to question him further: if he knew more of his cousin’s death than he had already told me, I could not doubt that the knowledge was very dark indeed. And yet it occurred to me—the young have such curious consciences—that it might be no more than remorse for some slight or unkindness to her which persuaded him to believe, with that certainty which sounded like knowledge, that she had committed suicide. Since the habit dies hard of discouraging the young from thoughts considered morbid—

“My dear boy,” I said, “that is altogether too fanciful, you know. People do not commit suicide in such a mood as you have described—I do not believe for a moment that your cousin killed herself.”

This afterwards proved to have been a most dangerous remark.

Did you happen to notice,” inquired Selena, “if he had a cloven foot? Or do your suspicions rest entirely on his being olive-skinned and having blue eyes? No doubt it is a most sinister combination, almost conclusive of his guilt; but there are unimaginative persons—such as sit on juries, you know—who might regard it as a quite natural consequence of his having a Greek father and an English mother.”

In the coffee-house at the top of Chancery Lane which is, on weekday mornings, the customary meeting place of the junior members of 62 New Square, Ragwort and I had given our account of our expedition into Sussex. Selena was disposed, as my readers will have gathered, to regard with skepticism the uneasiness I had felt during my conversation with Leonidas Demetriou.

“Did you,” she continued, turning to Cantrip, “have a similar sort of time in Cambridge? Was the Black Mass being said in your College chapel? Were there witches weaving spells in the Senior Common Room? Were there warlocks waltzing in the quad?”

It had been arranged that Cantrip would make a weekend visit to his alma mater, where he would attempt to contrive some meeting with Camilla. I had not supposed that much would come of it; but had not wished—for the boy meant well—to wound his feelings by saying so.

“No,” said Cantrip, with regret. “No, nothing like that. I had quite a jolly time, all the same. I went along to my College and dug out my ex-tutor—decent old geezer by the name of Grocklehurst. Taught me all I know about Equity and Succession.”

I knew Professor Grocklehurst a little personally, and well by reputation. Though not entirely sound, in my view, on the development of the action of
assumpsit,
he was a scholar of no small ability—I had often wondered by what youthful error or evil stroke of fortune he had found himself exiled to Cambridge.

“So I hauled him off to the nearest hostelry,” continued Cantrip, “and poured booze down him until he was feeling pretty genial, and then I told him about my hopeless passion for Camilla.”

“My dear Cantrip,” said Julia with some alarm, “I do hope the attachment is fictitious?”

“Oh, absolutely, but I had to think of some reason for wanting to see her again, didn’t I? Anyway, it was all dead easy, because it turned out old Grockles was teaching Camilla Equity and Succession as well. And he was having a breakfast party on Sunday morning, so he said he’d invite her along and I could try my luck. He didn’t fancy my chances much—he reckoned there’d been a lot of chaps trying to chat her up since she came to Cambridge, and none of them had got anywhere. I said they were probably all callow undergraduates and it would be a bit different if the chap doing the chatting up was a smooth and sophisticated man of the world.”

“I dare say it would,” said Ragwort. “But what exactly is the relevance of that to—? Oh, I see—my dear Cantrip, do forgive me for being so obtuse.”

I asked if the heiress had accepted Professor Grocklehurst’s invitation.

“Oh, like a shot—chuffed as chocolate about it. Grockles’s breakfast parties are rather a big deal socialwise—I mean, getting asked to them means you’re part of a sort of intellectual élite.”

“Cantrip,” I said, “were you, when at Cambridge, a frequent guest at these gatherings?”

“Oh, rather,” said Cantrip.

My heart bled for Grocklehurst.

“And is Camilla,” I asked “a member of this élite?”

“Well, not really. Bright but not brilliant, you know—that’s what Grockles thinks, anyway. But she wants to come to the Bar, and she’s frightfully keen and hardworking—always asking for extra reading lists and spent the last summer Vac working in a lawyer’s office to get experience. You wouldn’t catch me doing that sort of thing if I was due to get my paws on five million quid—but there’s no accounting for tastes. She’s one of those all round birds, though—plays tennis for her College and might get her blue for swimming.”

“A paragon,” said Selena, “of the Victorian virtues.
Mens sana in corpore sano
and no sex life. I wonder if she takes cold baths.”

“We may be about to learn,” said Ragwort, “that under the influence of Cantrip’s sophisticated charm her coldness melted like the snow in summer. I assume, Cantrip, that at this breakfast party you maintained the appearance of amorous pursuit?”

“Well, I had to, hadn’t I? Mind you, I don’t say I mightn’t have chatted her up a bit even if I hadn’t had to—she was looking quite fanciable. Anyway, I shovelled scrambled eggs down her in a worldly and sophisticated sort of way and it all went like a breeze. There was some fairly stiff competition from a chap from Trinity—fancied himself on account of being a baronet or something—but he never had a chance, because what she wanted to hear about was the inside story of life at the Bar. So in the end I took her off to lunch, leaving the Trinity chap standing at the post.”

“That,” I said, “was no doubt most gratifying. Did you manage to persuade her to talk about Deirdre at all?”

“Of course I did, or I wouldn’t be telling you about it, would I? I gave her a couple of martinis to soften her up, and then I said what rotten luck it was about Deirdre falling off the roof—you know, the manly sympathy bit. And she said pretty much the same as your Greek kid—you know, about Deirdre being a bit of pain and not much loss to anyone. Well, she didn’t put it like that—but the general picture was that Deirdre falling off the roof hadn’t exactly left an aching void in her life and she thought it’d be hypocritical to say it had. The way she saw it was that Deirdre’d always been miffed about not being the one who was going to get the loot, and the only way she could get her own back was by being fairly bloody-minded all the time—always whining and telling tales and so on. Well, that’s the way Camilla saw it. But then she went all stiff upper lip and said that Latin thing about mortuaries.”

“The phrase you have in mind,” said Ragwort, “is
‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum’
—that of the dead one should say only what is good.”

“That’s the one,” said Cantrip, impressed by his friend’s erudition. “She didn’t actually seem to be able to think of anything good to say about Deirdre, but she obviously thought it was a bit off to go on saying what a ghastly brat she’d been. So I kept on with the manly sympathy bit, but laying off the personal tragedy angle and putting more emphasis on the frightful shock aspect—you know, grimness of having to cope with the fuzz and the newspaper chaps and the Coroner and all that. And she went all stiff upper lip again, and said yes, it had been pretty grim, but specially grim for Aunt Dolly—that’s Dorothea.”

“Presumably,” I said, “because Dorothea was the last person to talk to Deirdre before she died.”

“Well, partly that. But mostly because of her husband—that’s the poet chap. The poet chap thought it was all his fault.”

Someone judged this a suitable moment to remind Cantrip of our empty cups and that it was his turn to buy coffee. I waited with some impatience to learn why Constantine Demetriou considered himself responsible for Deirdre’s death.

“Because of having this bust-up with Rupert. They were going on at each other all through lunch, the same as the Greek kid told you they were, and everyone else getting jolly fed up with them. But Camilla reckoned it was all the poet chap’s fault. The poet chap’s some kind of lefty, and Rupert can’t stand lefties at any price. So the poet chap shouldn’t have stirred things by talking about politics. That’s the way Camilla sees it.”

Leonidas blamed Camilla’s father, she blamed his—it was a pleasing instance of filial piety.

“So everyone else was trying to take no notice and concentrate on the Boat Race. But just as it got to the exciting bit and the boats came in sight from the balcony the poet chap suddenly went all huffy about something Rupert said, and said he was leaving at once and where was Dolly. So Cindy—that’s the ginger-haired bird—had to go and call Dolly down from the roof and Dolly came down and left Deirdre on her own there. So when Deirdre started leaning over to see the boats going under Barnes Bridge there wasn’t anyone there to hold on to her ankles. And that’s why the poet chap reckoned it was all his fault, because if he hadn’t lost his temper and insisted on leaving, Dolly would still have been up there to act as ankle-gripper.”

I reflected with admiration on the tormented subtleties of the artistic conscience. I was surprised, however, that the boy Leonidas had given me no hint of his father’s feelings.

“Shouldn’t think he knew about them,” said Cantrip. “I don’t mean the poet chap did the conscience-stricken bit there and then. But next day, when Camilla went round to Hampstead, she found Dolly all weepy and upset, and that’s when Dolly told her that the poet chap thought it was all his fault and she couldn’t persuade him it wasn’t and she didn’t know what to do. So I don’t suppose he’d done the conscience-stricken bit to anyone except Dolly.” Cantrip, who had contrived to combine his narrative with the consumption of a doughnut, now licked his fingers and looked regretfully at his empty plate. “Well, that’s as far as I got, really. I thought Camilla would think it a bit funny if I asked her exactly where everyone was standing and whether anyone happened to slope off to the loo—it’s not the sort of thing birds expect to be asked about when they’re being chatted up over lunch.”

Cantrip had done well, and I thought it right to say so. If he had failed, as it afterwards proved he had, to ask Camilla the one question which might even then have given me an inkling of the truth, he is hardly to be blamed: I freely confess that I myself might not have thought to ask it.

“Were arrangements made,” inquired Ragwort, “for a further meeting?”

“I said if she gave me a buzz next time she was in London I’d feed her the odd chip or two, and she seemed quite chuffed at the prospect. But it won’t be for two or three months—she’s going straight out to Corfu to stay with Dolly as soon as term’s over. She’s got a boat of her own out there, so she’s reckoning to spend most of her time sailing. That’s when she’s not swotting up on Equity and Succession and all that.”

A digression ensued: Selena was reminded that in some three weeks’ time she herself would be sailing in the same waters. She spoke a trifle defensively of the enterprise, for the courts would still be sitting: but Henry, it seemed, had so arranged her professional obligations over the past year as to disrupt at short notice her plans for Christmas, Easter and the present short Whitsun vacation, and she had at last rebelled. She had told Henry, kindly but firmly, that during the second fortnight in June the wheels of justice must roll on as best they could without her assistance: she would be sailing a small boat round the Ionian Islands in the company of her friend Sebastian Verity, out of reach of any form of long-distance communication which might demand her return to Lincoln’s Inn.

While Selena spoke joyfully of the prospect of sailing on the wide, blue, Henryless Ionian, I reflected on what we had learnt from Leonidas and Camilla. Could murder still be thought of as even a remote possibility? The timing was very fine: the dispute between Constantine Demetriou and Rupert Galloway had reached its climax at the moment when the boats came into view from the balcony; assuming that this was when they passed Chiswick Steps, we had calculated that four minutes would have been available before the moment at which Deirdre was known to have fallen; but this was now reduced by the time taken for the poet to announce his departure, for Lucinda to be sent to call her mother, and for Dorothea herself to come downstairs from the roof. Both accounts, moreover, had given the impression that all the members of the family were present in the drawing-room—or at least on the balcony or in the adjoining kitchen—when Dorothea returned to it. The only person whose presence there had not been expressly mentioned was—

“Ah, Mr. Tancred,” said Selena, anticipating my words, though in a tone more cordial than any I had thought to employ. Turning my head, I saw approaching our table the substantial figure of the Remington-Fiske family solicitor. He returned Selena’s greeting with equal warmth.

“Ah, Miss Jardine—this is an unexpected pleasure. May I join you? Unless,” he added, observing how many members of 62 New Square were gathered round our table, “I am intruding on a Chambers meeting?”

“Nothing like that,” said Selena. “A purely informal gathering. Do join us—you know Professor Tamar, don’t you?”

“Ah yes, I do, of course—how are you, Professor Tamar?” said the solicitor, disguising with a rather excessive enthusiasm for our present meeting his inability to recall our last. I thought it kind, when he had settled himself beside Selena, to remind him that it had been on the occasion of the proceedings under the Variation of Trusts Act, when I had chanced to be visiting Chambers.

“Ah yes, of course.” The syllables rolled mellow and rounded from his tongue. “How long ago it seems—extraordinary to think it was only in February.”