Over and out — Cantrip
The arrival of Ragwort and Selena distracted Julia from her Finance Bill and me from further reflection on Cantrip’s telex message. Not until Selena had purchased a bottle of Nierstein and we were all comfortably settled round the little candlelit table did it occur to me to ask Julia whether it was in fact the Cayman Islands or the Turks and Caicos that she had visited in the previous year.
She answered, with a dreamy and distant look, that it was indeed the Cayman Islands.
CHAPTER 4
EXTRACT FROM THE GUIDE TO COMFORTABLE TAX PUNNING
Cayman Islands: A group of islands in the Western Caribbean consisting of Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brae. A British Crown Colony settled in the seventeenth century by retired pirates, survivors of shipwrecks etc. Capitaclass="underline" Georgetown, Grand Cayman.
Pop.: 17,000. Total area: 100 square miles. Access: Approx. 1 hour by air from Jamaica or Miami. Principal industries: Tourism and financial services. Facilities include 400 banks and more telex machines per head of population than anywhere else in the world. Recommended season for meetings: October to March.
Note 1: An ample supply of English newspapers, which are much prized by the inhabitants of Georgetown, will ensure a cordial welcome.
“Properly regarded,” said Selena, gazing thoughtfully into her glass, “your experiences last year in the Cayman Islands could be incorporated very nicely, Julia, into this book that you and Cantrip are writing. Have you considered at all why your heroine is so cold and aloof, so reluctant to admit to any of the gentler passions?”
“I confess,” said Julia, “that I have assumed these qualities to be natural to her.”
“Oh no, surely not — I don’t think that would be at all sympathetic. No, as I see it, when Cecilia Mainwaring first came to the Bar she was a warm, generous, open-hearted girl whose clear, candid eyes gazed with trusting eagerness on the world about her. What has happened to change her? Why does that generous heart now wear the mask of cold indifference? Why do those candid eyes now flash with icy disdain? Ah, you may well ask.”
“You suggest that it is because she went to the Cayman Islands?”
“Because she went to the Cayman Islands, as you did, Julia, for reasons connected with her practise as a tax barrister, and there, as you did, she met — a man.” Selena invested the word with overtones of the monstrous. “A man much older than herself, an urbane and sophisticated man, experienced in the ways of the world. What could she know of such men, poor Cecilia, whose life had been spent in the chaste cloisters of Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn? Accustomed to the innocent banter and boyish camaraderie of her contemporaries, how could she resist his subtle and practised charm? In the sensuous warmth of the Caribbean night, fragrant with the scent of a hundred exotic flowers, she gave him her heart. He trifled with it for a while as lightly as a child with a new toy, and as lightly afterwards cast it aside.”
“Oh Selena, how sad,” said Julia, deeply moved. “But whether it’s an entirely fair account, so far as my own visit is concerned—”
“A most affecting tale,” said Ragwort, “remarkable for bearing no resemblance whatever to what happened to Julia in the Cayman Islands. If I recall the story correctly, Julia, you behaved extremely badly, and took advantage of a harmless, good-natured man who had not deserved ill of you.”
Julia, always willing to see both if not more sides of every question, seemed to find some difficulty in choosing between the versions of events proposed by her two friends. I suggested that she should tell me, quite simply and in her own words, precisely what had occurred.
In the previous November she had been appearing in a case before the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands — the details, though no doubt, as she claimed, of absorbing interest to any student of the law relating to bearer securities, are of no relevance to my present narrative. She had been accompanied by her instructing solicitor, who happened to be Clementine Derwent, and their visit had coincided with a meeting of those concerned with the Daffodil Settlement. The discretion customary among Swiss bankers and their advisers had precluded any mention of the actual name, but save that Clementine’s firm was at that time represented by Oliver Grynne, the senior partner, the meeting had been attended by the same people as that which had just taken place in Jersey and could safely be presumed to relate to the same matter.
“You will no doubt tell me,” I said, “that there is some perfectly good reason for those administering a Jersey settlement to meet in the Cayman Islands.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Julia. “It wouldn’t do at all, you see, for the funds of the settlement to be directly invested in the shares of companies resident in a high-tax jurisdiction such as the United Kingdom or the United States. The sensible thing is for the trustee of the settlement—
in this case Edelweiss (Channel Islands) Ltd. — to own shares in a private company resident in, let us say, the Cayman Islands and for that company to own shares in another private company resident in, let us say, Sark. The Sark company would be the one which owned the underlying investments — shares in ICI or General Motors or whatever it may be. The directors of the private companies, of course, would include one or two officials of the trust company and their professional advisers. And since a company is treated for tax purposes as resident in the country where its directors take their decisions, it’s essential for the directors of each company to have at least one board meeting a year in the place where it’s supposed to be resident.”
“There is nothing remarkable, then, about your having encountered the same group of people in the Cayman Islands whom Cantrip has been advising in Jersey?”
“By no means,” said Julia. “The world of tax planning is in some ways a fairly small one — one sees the same doorplates on the offices in Georgetown and St. Helier as one would in Bishopsgate or Lombard Street. I already knew most of the people involved in the Daffodil Settlement.”
I asked if she had had any previous acquaintance with Cantrip’s contessa.
“I’d met her once before — Clementine introduced me to her at a tax-planning seminar in Luxembourg about two years ago. Stingham’s are the London solicitors for the Edelweiss group, so she and Clementine have a good deal to do with each other. We all played truant together from one of the official dinners and did our bit to reduce the problem of the champagne lake. I’d been hoping I’d run into her again sometime, but she doesn’t seem to travel abroad very much. Most of what she does can be done from her office in Monte Carlo.”
“What exactly does she do?”
“She invests other people’s money for them — according to Clementine, with astonishing brilliance.”
“The name,” I said, “seems vaguely familiar. Wasn’t her husband once noted for some kind of sporting activity? Riding horses or driving motorcars or something of that sort?”
“I think he was a tennis player,” said Julia.
“Ah yes,” I said, remembering now that it was indeed in that sport that the Count di Silvabianca had fifteen or twenty years before achieved celebrity. Though he had never been quite among the first rank of players, his title and his exceptional good looks had combined to make him interesting to the gossip columnists and a certain portion of the public. I concluded that the Contessa shared Julia’s taste in profiles.
They also had in common, it seemed, an extreme distaste for the advances of Edward Malvoisin, which neither Julia’s diplomatic deception nor the Contessa’s devotion to her husband were ever quite sufficient to discourage. They had commiserated, on their first evening in the Cayman Islands, about the need to avoid doing or saying anything during their stay which Malvoisin might construe as encouragement.