Although Julia was absent from the gathering, presumably detained by paramount obligations with regard to the seminar, it had plainly been contrived with her assistance, possibly even her encouragement. Quite what she had said of me to persuade the Colonel that I ought to be there, and what role he expected me to play, I could only speculate, but he evidently believed my presence indispensable to his purpose — which was, it appeared, to find out what had happened to Cantrip.
“Thing is,” said the Colonel, “I’m getting a bit worried about the lad. Been AWOL more than forty-eight hours now. Twenty-four I wouldn’t worry about, but forty-eight starts looking like trouble. Well, he’s a bit of a po-faced young blighter at times, but I wouldn’t like anything to happen to him. The girls wouldn’t like it either — I’d never hear the last of it from the girls.” His look of sudden apprehension conjured up a regiment of female Cantrip relatives bitterly reproaching him for the loss of their cherished kinsman.
“Well,” said the accountant, “I’ve always known instructing Counsel meant a lot of fuss and bother, but this is the first time I’ve been told I ought to hire a nursemaid to see him home.”
“Are we to understand,” said Ardmore, seeming at least in some measure to share the old soldier’s anxiety, “that Michael has not yet returned to London? And that you’ve had no news of him for the past two days?”
“That’s right,” said the Colonel. “Tried ringing him at home this morning — no answer. Went round to what he calls his Chambers — not a sign of him. Then I got talking to the secretary there — nice little thing — what’s her name? Lily? Eileen? Something like that.”
“I believe,” I said, “that her name is Lilian.”
“That’s right. Well, I got talking to her, and it came out she was damned worried about the boy. She’s got a soft spot for him, apparently, and I can tell you, Professor, she was nearly in tears, poor little thing. She’s heard that some pretty rum things happen to people who get mixed up with this Daffodil business, and on Monday night some chap got himself killed. She didn’t know the details, though, and there was no one else down there who knew a damn thing about anything. I knew young Julie Larwood was lunching at the Godolphin, so I thought I’d pop round there and see if she’d heard the same story. And she told me that these two gentlemen had been with Mike in the Channel Islands, so if we had a word with them, we could get the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. So here we are.”
The degree of responsibility for the Colonel’s conduct implied by the pronoun we in his penultimate sentence was sufficient to make my blood run cold, but I could think of no way of disclaiming it.
“I might have known,” said Darkside. “I might have known that Larwood woman was at the bottom of all this nonsense. No offence, Colonel, but I’m a busy man, and quite frankly I think I’ve been brought here under false pretences. I came because you implied in your note that you could tell us something relevant to the Daffodil settlement, not to hear about a lot of silly rumours put about by a lot of silly women.”
“Colonel Cantrip,” said the Irishman, ignoring his colleague, “if I thought there was any cause for you to be worried about Michael, then I would be as concerned as you are, but I’m quite sure there is not. It’s true, I’m very sorry to say, that one of our colleagues met his death in an accident on Monday night. But if you’ll allow me to tell you about it, you’ll see that it has nothing to do with your nephew in any way at all.”
He gave the same account of Edward Malvoisin’s death that he had earlier recommended to Darkside, attributing it to an unlucky encounter with the drunken Albert in his career across the Coupee, but he delivered it now with a more unqualified conviction and the fluency of a man long practised in reassuring nervous clients of the safety of their investments. It had been, he concluded, a very tragic accident, but Cantrip had been in no way involved.
“Forgive me,” I said, “but is that entirely certain? Has either of you actually seen him since?” Had any members of Lincoln’s Inn been present they would probably have thought it helpful at this point to remind me that Cantrip had been alive and well and sending telex messages several hours after the time of the accident to the carriage, but fortunately there were none.
The Irishman seemed slightly disconcerted.
“I suppose — now that you mention it, Professor Tamar, I suppose not. The last time I saw him was on Monday evening in the bar of our hotel. He left us rather early, I remember. My colleague, the Contessa di Silvabianca, and our English solicitor, Miss Derwent, had been given rooms in an annex a little distance away from the main building and so had Michael. They both wanted an early night, and I think Michael felt that he ought to escort them back there. That must have been — sometime between quarter and half past ten, I suppose.”
“You see,” I said, “I was wondering whether Cantrip — whether Michael might conceivably have accompanied Edward Malvoisin on his nocturnal excursion.”
“Oh, I hardly think so, Professor Tamar. If Edward had an appointment at that hour of night, it must surely have been of a very confidential nature — I can’t believe he’d have wanted company. And they certainly didn’t leave at the same time. Edward stayed in the bar with us until — oh, about half past eleven, I should think. Do you remember, Gideon?”
“I remember him saying he wanted to get to bed,” said the accountant. “He didn’t say anything about going out.”
“The world is full of duplicity, Gideon. Since we know that in fact he did go out, we must infer that it was for some purpose he chose not to tell us of. And that’s the last time we saw the poor fellow alive. Gideon and I stayed on until midnight, when Philip Alexandre closed the bar. We were on our way up to our rooms when we heard all the noise of Albert coming back. We looked out of the landing window to see what was going on, and there he was up on his horse and shouting out about the woman in white, with Philip swearing back at him in Sercquais. Then he climbed down and started hurling bricks about. It was plain enough that he was as tight as a lord, and it didn’t occur to us that there was anything seriously wrong.”
The accountant had been looking with increasing frequency at his watch and giving other indications of impatience to be gone. The Irishman, however, took no notice of them, evidently intending to finish his brandy at leisure. It occurred to me that he felt a genuine reluctance to leave the Colonel with his anxiety unallayed.
“I do assure you,” he said, “that there is nothing sinister about the Daffodil Settlement, and I don’t doubt that at the time of the accident your nephew was safe in his bed. And if he was up bright and early in the morning and across the Coupee as soon as it was clear, he’d have been away on the boat to Jersey without ever hearing a word about poor Edward Malvoisin. After that you couldn’t blame him if he decided to stay on for a day or two. He’s enjoying himself on the beach at St. Brelade’s at this very moment, I daresay, with no idea of anyone being worried about him.”
“He could be in Timbuctoo,” said Darkside, “for all we can do about it. Well, Patrick, I don’t know about you, but I’ve paid good money to attend this seminar, even if it is just a lot of fancy lawyers talking a lot of hot air, and we’ve already missed twenty minutes of the afternoon session. So if you don’t mind, Colonel, I’ll be getting back to it.”