The Sibyl in Her Grave (8 page)

Selena had allowed her first cup of coffee to grow cold. She ordered another and sat gazing at it with a look of judicial severity, as if it were a witness she suspected of being evasive.

“According to Madame Louisa,” said Julia, “this ought to be a good day for me to solve problems. But she doesn’t seem to mean that I can be any help with yours—knowing that Ricky Farnham’s information came from Isabella doesn’t really take you any further.”

“Oh,” said Selena, “I wouldn’t say that exactly. At least it means I know what question I’m trying to answer. I thought what I had to guess was which of the directors wanted money enough to take the risk of insider dealing. Whereas what I actually have to guess is which of them was being blackmailed by Isabella into giving her confidential information.”

“You sound quite sure that that’s what was happening.”

“How else could she have known about the shares? Unless she really did have prophetic powers, of course—but it would be rather odd, wouldn’t it, if they only applied to takeovers involving one particular investment bank?”

“But how could she make use of the information if she never invested in the stock market?”

“Oh, by selling it—that’s to say, by passing it on to one or two favoured clients in the form of a psychic prediction. But the fee, I imagine, would have been considerably larger than people usually get for crystal gazing or reading tea leaves. It’s really rather clever—it would be almost impossible to prove that any offence had been committed.”

“Well,” said Julia, “if you’d like to tell your client about Isabella, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t—it can’t cause any embarrassment to my aunt.”

“No,” said Selena, frowning slightly. “No, I suppose not, but—all the same, I don’t think I’ll tell him. What he knows at present is that one of his codirectors is guilty of insider dealing. He doesn’t know which and it’s making him very unhappy. If I tell him about Isabella, he’ll know that one or the other of them must also be guilty of something else—something serious enough to
be blackmailed for—and he still won’t know which. I don’t think that’s going to make him feel any happier. And since it’s the duty of Counsel, so far as humanly possible, to keep the client happy, I’m not going to tell him.”

Her decision was taken, as my readers will have observed, with full and proper regard to the interests of her client. If I say that it might have been better had she decided otherwise, I speak with the benefit of hindsight.

“I remember your aunt’s little éclairs,” said Selena dreamily. “Do you think we could get ourselves invited?”

“Too late,” said Julia. “The service starts at twelve and it’s already twenty past eleven. Even if you drove—”

“Twenty past—? Oh Lord,” said Selena, and left in haste for her conference.

Julia and I finished our coffee and returned to Lincoln’s Inn at a more leisurely pace. We were in time to see a large black Mercedes motorcar draw up opposite the entrance to 62 New Square.

IT LOOKED LIKE
a funeral procession: four dark-suited men emerged from the long black motorcar and walked silently, in single file, towards the steps leading up to the main doorway.

From the doorway of 63 New Square, Julia and I had no difficulty in observing them. They were led by an elderly gentleman, whom I recognised as the senior partner in a firm of City solicitors—his name, as I recalled, was Mr. Vavasour—and who was, I assumed, the solicitor instructing Selena on behalf of Sir Robert Renfrew. He was followed by Sir Robert Renfrew himself. I concluded that the other two were Sir Robert’s codirectors and potential successors—Edgar Albany and Geoffrey Bolton.

They might have been chosen to illustrate the characteristic differences between those of Saxon and those of Celtic descent. The one I thought of as Saxon was a little over six feet in height, heavily built and of florid complexion, his face egg shaped under thinning fair hair, with blue eyes as round as marbles and a small rosebud mouth curiously inappropriate in the face of a
middle-aged man. He walked rather stiffly, always looking straight ahead, as if not wishing to appear in any way impressed by his surroundings. Sir Robert, turning at the top of the steps to make some remark to him, addressed him as Edgar.

By a process of elimination, then, the other must be Geoffrey Bolton. He was several inches shorter than his rival and lighter boned, but giving the impression of a certain muscularity. His complexion was rather pale, his hair and eyebrows very black by contrast. Though I had read in the
Scuttle
that he was only five years younger than Albany, the resilience of his step and the alertness of his expression made the difference appear greater—at a distance one might almost have taken him for an undergraduate, still eager and curious.

And yet, despite these differences, either of them might reasonably have been described as “a middle-aged man in a City suit”; neither had any physical characteristic so remarkable that some reference to it would necessarily be added to that description; either, in short, might be the man whom the Reverend Maurice had seen emerging from the black Mercedes on its visits to Isabella.

That the mysterious visitor had been one or the other of them I already had little doubt. One of the directors of Renfrews’ had been supplying Isabella with confidential information: he must therefore have been in some form of regular communication with her. If one of them owned or habitually drove a black Mercedes, it would be perverse to imagine that her only regular visitor from outside Parsons Haver had been someone entirely different, driving by pure coincidence a black motorcar of the same expensive and accordingly unusual make.

I had only to discover which of the directors was the
owner of the car and I would at once know the answer to the problem which was so much troubling Selena.

There was one obstacle, however, to my reaching an immediate solution: neither Albany nor Bolton had on this occasion actually been driving the car. The driver was a young woman, who remained in the driving seat while the four men descended. Having set down her passengers, she manoeuvred the car into a parking space in the middle of Old Square and set off on foot in the direction of the gateway to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She walked briskly, as if with some definite objective.

Though there might have been other ways of learning who owned the Mercedes, the Scholar in pursuit of knowledge is impatient of any delay. Bidding a hasty good-bye to Julia, I set off at a similar pace in the same direction.

The young woman went through the gateway and was hidden from my view, but came in sight again when I reached the Fields—a tall, slim figure in a beige raincoat, her fair hair drawn back to the nape of her neck in some kind of knot or chignon. The athletic vigour of her stride began to suggest to me that she intended to walk some distance, perhaps, after all, despite the threatening sky, only for the sake of exercise. It was with some relief that I saw her enter the small Museum on the north side of the Fields founded by the late Sir John Soane.

There is a book, in the entrance hall of the Museum, in which visitors are invited to inscribe their names. I noticed, as I signed, that the name above mine, neatly written, with a fountain pen rather than a ballpoint, was Katharine Tavistock, with an address in Islington.

Not seeing her in any of the ground-floor rooms, I
climbed the winding staircase to the first floor, my progress a little impeded by enthusiastic groups of tourists and schoolchildren. I eventually caught up with her in the Picture Room, where she appeared absorbed in the series of paintings by Hogarth known collectively as the
Rake’s Progress
. Concealing myself behind a conveniently placed statue of Apollo, I was able to study her unobserved while considering how I should approach her.

She was older than I had at first imagined—not less, though perhaps not much more than forty—and too large boned and large featured to be, or ever have been considered, beautiful. She was wearing a severely tailored trouser suit—no doubt expensive, but seeming designed to convey competence and professional standing rather than any interest in allurement. Some quality about her made me dismiss the idea of a matrimonial connection with any of her former passengers; and yet she did not quite look like a person employed solely as a driver. I decided that she must be the personal assistant of whom Selena had spoken and in whom Sir Robert had expressed such absolute trust.