The Shortest Way to Hades (5 page)

“My dear Selena,” I said, rising, “I had no intention of concealment. I wished to refresh my memory of the modern form of disentailing deed, and thought you would not object if I consulted your
Encyclopædia.”

“It just shows,” said Selena, “how one may be misled by appearances. One might so easily have thought, if one didn’t know better, that you were deliberately eavesdropping on our clients.”

“There were people here, certainly,” I said, “and I suppose they were your clients. Anyone who imagined, however, that their trifling exchanges could have distracted me from my researches would understand little of the mind of the Scholar.”

A telephone call to Julia informed her that the coast was clear—that is to say, that she could now bring Deirdre round to 62 New Square without risk of any embarrassing encounter with the other members of the family. When she arrived, however, she was without her client.

“She doesn’t seem,” said Julia, “to be feeling terribly well. I don’t know why—we only had two bottles of champagne last night. I think your client must have been upsetting her, Selena. Still, I gave her an Alka-Seltzer and told her to sit quietly until she felt better. She doesn’t have to be in Court for the hearing, does she?”

“No, of course not,” said Selena. “None of them do, as long as we have their instructions. But they all seem to be regarding it as the trial of the century, so they might be rather put out if we said they needn’t be there. By the way, Julia, you do realize, don’t you, that Camilla’s father—”

But I did not learn what it was that Julia should realize about Rupert Galloway, for at this moment a further visitor arrived in the waiting-room, inquiring anxiously if he had come to the right place and whether he was in time. It was the Greek boy.

There are Greek boys and Greek boys. There are many Greek boys, no doubt, who are fat and have spots; whose profiles are in no way reminiscent of fifth-century Athens; whose hair has not the blue-blackness of a cluster of ripe grapes; Greek boys, in short, who leave the observer baffled by Homer’s reference to “that most charming age when the beard first begins to grow.” Leonidas Demetriou was one of the others.

“Oh,” said Julia, looking at the Greek boy.

“Oh, dear,” said Selena, looking at Julia.

“Oh,” said Julia again, “you must be Leonidas.” She pronounced the name with the accent on the penultimate syllable, and the “d” as a voiced fricative, like the last phoneme in soothe.

“Oh,” said the boy, with an enchanting smile, “how delightful to find someone who speaks Greek.”

Julia’s knowledge of the modem Greek language is confined, as I happened to know, to a few such essential phrases as “good morning,” “good afternoon,” “where does the bus leave from?” and “what beautiful eyes you have,” supplemented, when this last proves inadequate for its purpose, by various passages learnt by heart from the work of the poet Cavafy; but she uttered no disclaimer.

Upon the other members of the family, when they again gathered in the waiting-room, she bestowed the vaguest of benevolent smiles, and went on gazing at Leonidas with the expression of a six-year-old contemplating a large slice of chocolate cake. During our progress to the Law Courts she continued to make him the sole object of her attention, pointing out to him, as if personally provided by herself for his entertainment, the lawns and historic alleyways of New Square, and burbling inaccurate fragments of the history of Lincoln’s Inn. She let fall from time to time a word or two of Greek, as if it were with difficulty, and only out of courtesy to the rest of us, that she refrained from lapsing entirely into that language. When we arrived at the doors of Court 25, she prevailed on him to assist her in the adjustment of her wig and gown and the restoration to proper symmetry of her collar and white bands. It was all, as Ragwort said afterwards, perfectly disgraceful.

The application itself went smoothly enough, though Camilla, a few feet away from me in the public benches, sat through it looking as pale and tense as if the proceedings were of a criminal nature and she the accused: I reminded myself again how large a proportion of her inheritance was in issue. Rupert Galloway, sitting beside her, seemed to share her nervousness. I saw now that he was less good-looking than, at a distance, I had supposed he might be: a drooping blond moustache failed to conceal the petulance of his mouth, and the slight wateriness of his pale eyes contradicted the authority of an almost Romanesque profile.

“As your Lordship will see,” said Basil Ptarmigan, “we have thought it right to provide in the Arrangement some douceur for the unborn and minor issue of Lalage Robinson and of Mrs. Demetriou. It is a hundred thousand pounds in each case.”

“That seems very generous, Mr. Ptarmigan,” said Mr. Justice Lorimer with approval, “most generous.”

Julia turned her head to smile at Leonidas, as if it had been for his sake, rather than Deirdre’s, that she had negotiated so liberal a provision.

I had found it a morning not without interest; so that when, some three months later, I stood in my room at St. George’s with the telephone in my hand and was asked by Timothy if I remembered the Remington-Fiske application, I was able to answer that indeed I did.

“But who,” I said, “has been murdered?”

“I’m not at all sure that anyone has,” said Timothy. “But the poor girl’s certainly dead, and Julia thinks it’s murder. If you get the next train to London, you can be in the Corkscrew by six-thirty or so, can’t you? We’ll tell you about it then and take you out to dinner.”

He rang off without telling me which poor girl was dead.

The urgency of Timothy’s invitation might have justified a taxi; but I was content, on a gentle May evening, to travel by Underground from Paddington to Charing Cross and from there walk at leisure to my destination, observing the streams of office-workers bound eagerly homewards from Kingsway and High Holborn. It was that season of the year when London is at her most hopeful and adventurous: her citizens go lightly clad, without raincoats or umbrellas; they plant geraniums on the window-sills of gray commercial buildings; they buy strawberries from men at street corners; they talk optimistically of British chances at Wimbledon.

Only the deepening blue of the sky suggested the approach of evening, and the sun still shone brightly on High Holborn. Little of it, however, was allowed to penetrate the interior of the Corkscrew, whose habitues are more at ease in a conspiratorial dimness. Timothy was waiting for me at one of the round oak tables, a bottle of Niersteiner already open.

“Timothy,” I said, “will you please now abandon these childish devices to excite my curiosity, and tell me, simply and straightforwardly, which poor girl is dead and why Julia thinks it’s murder?”

“Have you really heard nothing about it? I thought you’d have seen it in the newspapers—it was quite widely reported.”

“Recently?” I asked, puzzled, for I thought that a mention in the press of the Remington-Fiske family would have attracted my attention.

“About two months ago. On the day, to be precise, of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.”

My ignorance was explained: I had spent the Easter vacation in the United States of America, dependent for English news on the
New York Times.
I had formed the impression that April had been a quiet month in England.

Timothy took from his briefcase a thin cardboard folder, from which he drew a newspaper cutting.

“This is the report of the inquest which was in the
Scuttle.
The reports in the other newspapers are much the same, but this is the fullest.” He pushed the cutting towards me across the polished oak table, and I leant forward to study it by the flickering candlelight. It was illustrated by a photograph of Camilla Galloway.

“I see,” I said. “Poor Deirdre.”

“And Julia thinks it’s murder,” said Timothy. “She’s really very worried. She seems to feel, you see—there are Cantrip and Ragwort. I’d better get another bottle.”

Resigned to the obligations consequent on three years’ seniority, Timothy rose and moved towards the bar. Cantrip and Ragwort joined me in the circle of candlelight: I admired, as always when I see them together, the pleasing contrast between Cantrip’s black hair and black eyes and the demure autumnal coloring of Ragwort.

“Hello, Hilary,” said Cantrip, “we thought we’d find you here. Offer free grub and free booze, we said, and we’d have you here in two shakes of a mortarboard.”

“What Cantrip means is,” said Ragwort, “that we were confident that an appeal from Timothy for your assistance would not go unheeded.”

“I don’t yet know,” I said, “why my assistance should be required. All I have heard so far is that Deirdre Robinson fell from a roof on the afternoon of the Boat Race, and Julia thinks it’s murder.”

“Precisely so,” said Ragwort. “And is greatly troubled by it.”

“Flapping like a moonstruck moorhen,” said Cantrip, “and going on about Sir Thomas More and making everyone’s life a misery.”

That Julia in a state of agitation would resemble such a bird as Cantrip had mentioned I could readily believe; the relevance of Sir Thomas More I would, I suppose, in due course discover; but why, some two months after the event, there should suddenly be this anxiety as to the cause of Deirdre’s death—

“Because of the letter,” said Cantrip. “Hasn’t Timothy told you?”

There are days on which Julia does not open letters. She is overcome, as I understand it, by a sort of superstitious dread, in which she is persuaded that letters bode her no good: they will be from the Gas Board, and demand money; or from the Inland Revenue, and demand accounts; or from some much valued friend, and demand an answer. If a letter arrives on such a day as this, she does not open it but puts it carefully away, to be dealt with when she feels stronger. After that, I had always supposed, it is never seen again.

“That, certainly,” said Timothy, returning with the wine, “is the normal course of events. You will remember, however, that there are also periods of reform, during which we are promised a new, improved and more organized Julia. They generally don’t last long enough to matter much. But they always begin, of course, with a tidying of papers: that’s how she came across this.” He again opened his briefcase.

The letter was amateurishly typed, though on paper of excellent quality; the postmark on the envelope which had contained it was four days earlier than the date of the Boat Race.

Not the most graceful of letters, from a young woman asking a favor of a comparative stranger; but that might perhaps be shyness. I was not surprised by the letter’s effect on Julia. In the circumstances it had something of the quality of a deathbed request, and Julia would feel a sense of guilt that she had not complied with it—though, had she done so, she would have waited in vain for Deirdre, who by seven o’clock on the Saturday of the Boat Race had already the best of all excuses for failing to keep her engagements. She had wanted to tell Julia of something she had discovered; some childish and trivial secret, very probably, of no interest to anyone; but she had died without telling it. I could understand that Julia would feel troubled.

The letter lay mute and unhelpful in the candlelight, like the embodiment of some small, resentful ghost.

“I suppose,” I said, “that you could take it to the police.”

“Yes,” said Timothy, frowning slightly at his wineglass. “Yes, we did consider that. But it’s not really evidence of anything, is it? If the police did nothing, Julia would remain uneasy. On the other hand, if they did reopen the case, several perfectly innocent people might be quite unnecessarily upset.”

“So she got this idea,” said Cantrip, “that we ought to do it ourselves. Rootle about and look for clues, you know, but being all tactful and unobtrusive, so as not to upset anyone. Well, what I said was, if you get half the Chancery Bar crawling along the towpath with magnifying glasses looking for bloodstains, it might be a lot of things, but unobtrusive isn’t one of them. Apart from which, I said, I couldn’t see it was any of our business—after all, if the bird’s family aren’t fussed about her getting pushed off the roof, why should Julia worry about it?”