Sarah Caudwell - Thus Was Adonis Murdered

We considered this Jacobean sequence. Selena relaxed her usual pressure on the accelerator and surrendered to a taxi her position in the fast lane.

“I was under the impression, Cantrip,” said Timothy, “that you regarded Bruce as the principal suspect — the man Eleanor was talking about.”

“Yes,” said Cantrip, “but I didn’t know then that Julia’d been found in a compromising situation with the American bird. My money’s on Stanford now — I don’t mind an each-way saver on the Bruce character. Who are you backing, Ragwort?”

“I am not addicted,” said Ragwort, “to the vice of gambling. But it seems to me that this mistaken identity idea is an unnecessary complication. I would have thought the girl herself was a more likely suspect.”

“The American bird?” said Cantrip. “Why?”

“Let us by all means accept,” said Ragwort, “that Julia’s relationship with this girl was of pellucid innocence. From Julia’s point of view. It will not have escaped your notice, however, that the chain of events which led to Julia being in a state of deshabille on Marylou’s bed, with Marylou’s head on her shoulder — and our knowledge of anatomy, assisted, in Cantrip’s case, by personal recollection, reminds us, in this connection, that Julia’s shoulder is an area closely adjacent to Julia’s admirable bosom — that each of that chain of events was initiated by Marylou?”

“She only offered to mend Julia’s skirt,” said Cantrip.

“Oh, quite so,” said Ragwort. “There is a perfectly innocent explanation for everything she did and it is of course our duty, as Cantrip so rightly points out, to assume, if we possibly can, that it is the correct one. Were we, however, briefly to be dispensed from that charitable obligation—” Ragwort leant back and gazed up at the roof of the car with a very spiritual expression, probably wasted on it.

“Let us grant ourselves,” said Timothy, “a hypothetical dispensation.”

“Ah well, in that case, as I have already suggested, one might see what she did in a rather different light. And it would then be material to notice that Julia’s own behaviour, as described by herself, could have been construed as not wholly discouraging. She had paid the girl compliments. She had kissed her on the nose outside the Casa Rezzonico. She had talked to her about the Renaissance and the Chancery Bar. There had been, in short, nothing in Julia’s manner to indicate that she would recoil from an advance with loathing and abhorrence. If, indeed, that is what she would have done.”

“If you mean,” said Selena, stepping rather severely on the accelerator and overtaking the taxi again, “that Julia is not the sort of woman who would wantonly wound anyone’s feelings, particularly those of a girl who had been kind to her and was alone and friendless in a strange country—”

“Of course,” said Ragwort, “that is exactly what I mean.”

“So the way you see it,” said Cantrip, “this American bird got a lech for Julia and fancied her chances?”

“I would not have expressed it,” said Ragwort, “with quite such felicity. But that is the essence of what I am suggesting. And if Marylou is a romantic sort of girl, who might take such an attachment seriously, then it seems not impossible, if she discovered Julia’s interest in the man from the Revenue, that she might make use of her dressmaking scissors to dispose of her rival.”

“Doesn’t work,” said Cantrip. “Because whoever did in the chap from the Revenue left things set up so that Julia got clobbered for it. I mean, either they wanted her to get clobbered or they didn’t mind her getting clobbered. If the American bird was keen on Julia, she wouldn’t have done that.”

“Oh?” said Ragwort, looking at Cantrip in great surprise, “Oh, don’t you think so? I cannot pretend, of course, to your worldly experience; but I would rather have thought it was precisely what she might do.”

The tedium of securing a parking space at Heathrow and of the checking-in procedure I have fortunately no need to share with my readers. When it was done with we managed to find a table in one of the airport bars overlooking the area into which passengers from Venice would emerge to find transport.

“Selena,” said Timothy, “what was it you were saying last night about Eleanor Frostfield?”

“Oh,” said Selena, casually, “there were one or two things about Eleanor which I thought quite interesting. The first was the excellence of her tax arrangements. She has taken, it appears, every step Julia can think of to minimize the claims of the Revenue on her personal income — every step, that is, except marriage to an impecunious husband. One may perhaps find it a little surprising — or one may not, I leave it entirely to you—” Selena spread one hand in a gesture illustrating the liberality with which she offered us this choice—“that a woman so admirably advised should allow such a defect in her arrangements to go unremedied. Then there’s this matter of the row with Kenneth Dunfermline. The sort of row, as Julia rather perceptively remarks, which usually occurs only between persons on terms of some intimacy. One gathers,” she added, as off-handedly as a Persian cat not noticing the cream, “that Kenneth is an artist. It is, of course, a notoriously unremunerative profession.”

“I say,” said Cantrip, “are you suggesting that Eleanor and this Dunfermline chap are married to each other?”

“My dear Cantrip, I am suggesting nothing. I am merely drawing attention to one or two matters of possible interest. If they seem to you to point to any particular conclusion—” she spread both hands, in a gesture of even greater generosity.

“But if they were married,” said Cantrip, “why were they pretending they’d only just met?”

“I don’t think they were,” said Selena. “Julia assumed they didn’t know each other because they weren’t sitting together on the plane. Everything after that suggests at least an acquaintance. A marriage, if one of mere fiscal convenience, they might well choose not to publicize; but that’s another matter.”

“Even if you were right,” said Timothy, “would it get us anywhere?”

“No,” said Selena, absentmindedly, “no, I suppose not. But one can’t help thinking, can one, about that conversation between Kenneth and Eleanor, when he seems to have been insisting on carrying on with some plan or other against her wishes. Some plan involving a friend of his. And at the Lido, Ned says that Kenneth has plans to make both their fortunes. It rather sounds, doesn’t it, as if Kenneth were engaged in some kind of commercial enterprise which he expected to be profitable — and in which, for some reason, Ned was an essential participant. Of course,” said Selena, in a manner so casual as to suggest that she had almost lost interest in the subject, “if Eleanor had married Kenneth for reasons of fiscal advantage and he were then, after all, to earn a large sum of money, the effect on her tax position would be quite catastrophic.”

The suggestion that Eleanor Frostfield had done away with Ned to safeguard the marginal tax advantage of a hypothetical marriage to Kenneth Dunfermline may seem to my readers, seeing it in the coldness of print, too fanciful to be entertained for a moment. My readers, however, have not been exposed to the oblique seductiveness of Selena’s advocacy.

“My dear Selena,” said Timothy, “it is a most attractive and ingenious hypothesis. It might even, I suppose, be right. But would you care to estimate my chances of persuading the Italian police that it is probable? No, Selena, it won’t do. Remember, we don’t have to find out who did the murder — all that matters as far as we’re concerned is satisfying the police that Julia didn’t. But if I do have to start suggesting alternative suspects, I’d rather it was someone reasonably obvious.”