The Shortest Way to Hades (6 page)

“That proved,” said Ragwort, “to be an ill-advised remark.”

“Too right,” said Cantrip. “It was when I said that that she got all miffed and started talking about Sir Thomas More and the traditions of the English Bar. This Thomas More chap was something in history—you ought to have heard of him, Hilary.” His tone implied, however, that he did not suppose I had. “Julia thinks he’s hot stuff, and she reckons that if someone had bumped off one of his clients he’d have done something about it. She went on about him for ages.”

“Sir Thomas More, saint and martyr,” said Ragwort, “as of course you know, Hilary, was the only member of Lincoln’s Inn ever to be canonized: a very proper object of admiration for Julia, and indeed all of us. Were it possible, however, to dwell excessively upon so improving a topic, one might be tempted to say that Julia had done so.”

“You bet one might,” said Cantrip. “Anyway, if he was allowed to waste time playing detectives instead of getting on with his paperwork, he can’t have had a Clerk like Henry. The thing is, you see, we’re all frantically busy at the moment, and we just can’t spare the time. So what we thought we’d better do,” said Cantrip happily, “was get you to do it, Hilary. It’s just your sort of thing—digging up odds and ends of gossip and finding out things that aren’t your business.”

I remarked with some coldness that my own time was not so entirely undisposed of as my companions appeared to believe, and I doubted whether my academic responsibilities would allow me to undertake the task they envisaged for me. If they wished merely to prevent Julia from talking about Sir Thomas More, I supposed some simple but humane form of gag would sufficiently serve the purpose.

“What Cantrip means is,” said Ragwort, “that your flair for research and your training in the methods of Scholarship seemed to us to make you uniquely qualified to conduct the investigation. That
is
what you meant, isn’t it, Cantrip?”

“Oh rather,” said Cantrip.

“And we ventured to hope,” continued Ragwort, “that by this stage of the summer term the burden of your academic duties might be less onerous than at other times of the year.”

“I’m afraid,” said Timothy, “that Julia will be quite upset if you won’t do it. She has great faith in your detective powers, you know, since that trouble she had in Venice. She often says that if it weren’t for you she might still be languishing in a dungeon under the Doge’s Palace.”

In this, as it happens, she spoke no more than the truth. When she had been suspected by the Venetian police of responsibility for a crime of passion, it had been my own investigation which had established her innocence and secured her freedom: I have written elsewhere of these events.
¹
A recognition of my achievement was not, however, so widespread in Lincoln’s Inn that I could be unmoved by it. Besides, for all her failings, I am fond of poor Julia, and would not wish to think of her distressed. Upon the understanding that I might look towards New Square for such assistance as their professional engagements would allow, I consented to give my mind to the question of Deirdre’s death.

Cantrip was obliged to leave us. He attends on Friday evenings at the offices of the
Daily Scuttle,
where it is his function to peruse the items intended for the Saturday issue of that journal and to damn to deletion those likely, in his professional opinion, to expose its proprietors to civil or criminal proceedings. Some of my readers may think that his educational disadvantages—for which, I have always said, he is rather to be pitied than blamed—would render him unsuited to such a task; but the
Scuttle
is fortunately one of those periodicals which eschew, so far as possible, all words of more than two syllables, so that very little of it is incomprehensible to him.

“Cantrip,” I said, “while you’re there, could you see if you can discover from your Fleet Street colleagues any further details of the evidence given at the inquest?”

“I’ll have a bash,” said Cantrip. “With lots of subtlety and discretion, of course. Toodle-pip, all of you—I’ll see you later in Guido’s.”

His departure from the Corkscrew coincided with the arrival there of Julia and Selena, both looking rather at their best. Selena wore a round-necked dress of sky-blue cotton, most becoming to herself and to the season: I remembered, seeing her, that the Courts had risen for Whitsun, and a member of the Bar could be seen in bright colors without inviting the inference of a declining practice. Julia also wore something in holiday style, of a design sufficiently
dégagé
to suffer little from the loss of a button or two.

It occurred to me that Julia herself was the only one of us who had had any personal acquaintance with the dead girl. Deirdre Robinson had seemed to me, from the little I had seen of her, to be peculiarly lacking in any attractive qualities; but I supposed that Julia, on the evening they had spent together, might have perceived in her client some hidden charm or talent.

“No,” said Julia sadly. “No, not really. She was, as you say, very plain, and rather dull, and she didn’t seem to like anyone very much. But I still think it matters if someone pushed her off the roof.” Julia spoke as if expecting contradiction. “One’s protection from acts of violence doesn’t depend, in a civilized society, on being talented or attractive or making people like one. It depends on the law. That, as I understand it, is the distinguishing characteristic of civilization: to protect those one likes or loves is no more than the merest barbarian might do.”

“No doubt,” said Timothy. “But why should the whole burden of defending civilization and the rule of law fall on the members of New Square?”

“I would suggest,” said Julia, absent-mindedly flicking her cigarette ash into her wineglass, “that those of us who have made the law our study and our profession have a more than ordinary responsibility to uphold the principles upon which it rests. It is a responsibility acknowledged in the traditions of the English Bar and the rules which govern our conduct. One can’t refuse to act for someone, for example, because one dislikes or disapproves of them.”

“No,” said Timothy. “One can’t pick and choose one’s clients.”

“Because otherwise there would be people who could find no one to represent them, and would be prevented from defending or enforcing their rights: the law would be applied for the benefit of some and not of others, and this would be inconsistent with the principles on which it is based. If the law is personal and partial in its application; if it defends only strength and restrains only weakness; if it varies and veers and wavers to meet the demands of power or the expediency of the moment—then it no longer has the quality of law: our civilization is built on sand, and we slide back before we realize it into that state of Nature in which, as we are told, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Selena. “These are very proper sentiments, Julia, and do you credit. Do you feel better now?”

Julia, however, continued for some time after this to discourse on the high principles and noble traditions for which Sir Thomas More had gone to the scaffold and Erskine May had resigned high office. I blame for this sort of thing the authors of the
Guide to Professional Conduct
which is handed out wholesale to all those called to membership of the English Bar: they have seen fit to include in it a number of sensational and romantic tales about barristers behaving well and acting on principle and so forth; and have too little considered, in my opinion, what effect these may have on impressionable persons such as Julia, who misunderstand things and take it all seriously.

“My dear Julia,” I said at last, “do not distress yourself further about these matters. I have consented to undertake the inquiry, and there is no need for you to worry any more about civilization or the rule of law or what Sir Thomas More would have done. Sir Thomas will understand that you have done your best, and when civilization crumbles it will not be your fault at all. It is only fair to tell you, however, that I shall engage in the investigation without sharing your belief that it is a case of murder.”

She gave me a look of polite but distrustful inquiry, as if suspecting me of a wish to evade my task or excuse in advance a lack of zeal in its performance.

“Don’t you see,” I said, “that it’s the wrong girl who’s dead?”

Murder is unusual. The irritations, disappointments, envies and desires of everyday life are generally resolved in some manner less extreme. When it occurs, then, or is thought to have occurred, there must be looked for to account for it some unusual feature in the surrounding circumstances—some unusual wrong to be avenged, some unusual passion to be assuaged, some unusual advantage to be obtained.

A personal fortune of five million pounds is unusual. To gain possession of it, it is conceivable that someone might behave in a manner quite contrary to custom and convention. At a gathering, therefore, of the descendants of Sir James Remington-Fiske a murder would be not wholly unaccountable.

But one would expect it to be the heiress who was murdered.

“Camilla, however, lives and flourishes, and the supposed victim of your imagined crime is the insignificant poor relation. The rich, my dear Julia, commit many wrongs against the poor; but they seldom murder them, and hardly ever for gain.”

Julia sat silent in the candlelight, perceiving the force of my argument but unpersuaded by it.

“Moreover,” I continued, “it cannot be said that Deirdre’s death is mysterious or unexplained. There has been an inquest and evidence has been given and the Coroner is satisfied that it was an accident. The probability surely is that he is right?”

“Oh, but he can’t be.” It was Selena who answered, surprising me by her firmness. “However Deirdre came to fall from the roof at Rupert’s flat, it can’t have happened in die way the Coroner thought. Julia and I have been there, you see, and we know it can’t. I think we had better tell you—if Timothy and Ragwort don’t mind hearing it again—the story of the Grateful Client.”

¹
Thus Was Adonis Murdered

The story of the Grateful Client had its beginning in November of the previous year, when Selena received instructions from Tancred’s to appear in a possession action in the Wandsworth County Court. The lay client was Rupert Galloway, whose landlords were seeking to forfeit the lease of his penthouse for an alleged breach of the covenant not to use it for any profession or business. Rupert admitted that the penthouse had become the registered office of Galloway Opportunities Limited, a company of which he was the managing director, and that the company’s affairs were conducted from that address; but he denied, and wished Selena to deny on his behalf, that this amounted to a breach of the covenant.

“What opportunities,” I asked, “does this company provide?”

“You could say,” said Selena, “that it gives those wishing to invest in commodity futures the opportunity to take advantage of Rupert’s expertise—that’s how Rupert puts it. Or you might say that it gives Rupert the opportunity to speculate with other people’s money. It’s a question of how you look at it.”

She had thought the case difficult but not hopeless. There were, she proposed to argue, two distinguishing features which characterized the carrying on of a business—the attendance of customers and the employment of staff; if these were absent, there would be no breach of covenant. She assumed, and Rupert confirmed, that his clients did not come in person to the penthouse to buy and sell cocoa futures. As to employing staff—she had asked Rupert specifically whether he employed anyone to assist him with the company’s affairs, and he had firmly assured her that he did not: his daughter sometimes helped out by typing a few letters for him, and one of his girlfriends did the same thing; but that, he said, was all.

When, therefore, it was revealed in evidence on the first day of the hearing that a young lady, identified by the diligence of the landlords’ inquiry agent as being on the books of a leading secretarial agency, had visited the penthouse from 10 o’clock in the morning until 1 o’clock in the afternoon on three days a week for a period of months, Selena was rather cross.

“Cross,” said Julia, “is not quite the word. You expressed the desire, on your return to Lincoln’s Inn, to boil your client in oil and feed him very slowly to man-eating piranha fish.”

Reproached for his duplicity, her client had claimed that the young lady from the secretarial agency was in fact the girlfriend whom he had mentioned, and had sought to imply, by various winks and leers, that the purpose of her visits was more amorous than secretarial. It seemed to Selena, however, that their regularity was uncharacteristic of a romantic association.

“On the basis of our own experience,” said Ragwort, “I should have thought it even more uncharacteristic of an agency typist.”

Selena had spent an evening intended for better things in revising her closing speech to accommodate in her definition of non-business use the employment of a part-time secretary. She had felt, on concluding her labors, quite pleased with the result, and when she delivered the speech on the following day had thought that the judge listened not unfavorably. On the day fixed for judgment, however, she had found herself engaged in the High Court, which naturally took precedence over the Wandsworth County Court. Julia, having no unalterable commitments on that day, was prevailed on to take her place.

Finding Wandsworth County Court was an enterprise, according to Julia’s account of it, of more or less equivalent difficulty to tracing the source of the Blue Nile; but she had surmounted the rigors of the journey, and arrived, albeit flushed and breathless, in time to take the judgment—which was, of course, in Rupert’s favor.

“I wouldn’t have thought,” said Timothy, “that there was any ‘of course’ about it—it sounds like a very near thing.”

“When Selena tells us,” said Julia, “that she was quite pleased with her closing speech, we may safely conclude that it was the finest piece of advocacy ever heard in south-west London—our success was not in doubt. All that remained for me to do was to bow and ask for costs, and be taken to lunch by the lay client.”