Thus Was Adonis Murdered (4 page)

“And in words of four syllables what he is telling you,” said Selena.

“Quite sure,” said Timothy. “One’s instructing solicitor is, of course, entitled to be present, but he may quite properly waive his rights in the matter.”

“Well, if you say so,” said Ragwort, “then naturally we accept it. Since you are buying us dinner. But what seems so strikingly unconventional is that you should go to the client. It is surely a long-established rule of etiquette that the client comes to Counsel. It has always been my understanding that only in the most exceptional cases, such as grave disability—”

“My client,” said Timothy, “does, in a sense, suffer from a disability. He can’t face coming to England. He spent his thirteenth year at an English public school and this inspired in him such an aversion to this country that he has since refused to set foot in it.”

“How eccentric,” said Selena. The honey of her voice was seasoned, as it were, with lemon: herself much attached to her native land, she is inclined to take personally any disparagement of it. “If he doesn’t mind living in Cyprus, dodging the crossfire between the Turks and the Greeks, it is quite absurd of him to be afraid of coming to England. And if he is prepared to go to Italy, which, as we all know, is at present in the grip of a vast crime wave—”

“Is it?” said Ragwort.

“My dear Ragwort, of course it is,” said Selena. “Crime in Italy is a national industry. If an Italian isn’t murdering someone in Calabria, it’s only because he’s too busy kidnapping someone else in Lombardy. Or embezzling public funds in Friuli. Or stealing little-known pictures from churches in Verona. Or burgling the Courthouse at Monza. That, at any rate, if
The Times
is to be relied on, is how they have spent the past week, and we have no reason to think it untypical.”

“My client,” said Timothy, “is not troubled, as I understand it, by the possibility of being murdered, kidnapped or embezzled. His objection to England is founded on the belief that the temperature never rises above forty degrees Fahrenheit, that the only food available is tepid rice pudding and that the population consists entirely of bullying prefects and ragging fourth-formers.”

“I wonder if it’s wise,” said Selena, “to send you to talk to him, Timothy. You do look very English, you know. You’ll probably remind him of his former geometry master and he’ll run away and hide.”

I seem to have omitted to give my readers any description of my former pupil. It is true, however, that he does have that long-boned, angular, straw-coloured look which is widely regarded as characteristic of the Englishman.

“Precisely what is it,” I asked, “that you have to persuade him to do?”

“I have to persuade him,” said Timothy, “to become domiciled in England before the 19th of December of this year.” He leant back comfortably in his chair, not looking like a man discouraged by the difficulty of the task before him. “On that date, which is his twenty-fifth birthday, the discretionary trust will come to an end. My client, as the only surviving descendant of his late grandfather, will scoop the jackpot. The capital transfer tax payable on that event, if my client is then domiciled outside the United Kingdom, will be something on the order of £450,000. If, on the other hand, he were then to be domiciled in England, tax would, of course, be charged at a concessionary rate under the transitional provisions of paragraph 14 to Schedule 5 of the Finance Act 1975 and he would have to pay only fifteen per cent of that sum.”

“That certainly seems,” I said, ignoring all this talk of Schedules and paragraphs, “to be a substantial inducement. But will it be enough to overcome his repugnance to this country?”

“Oh, my dear Hilary,” said Timothy, smiling at me, “he doesn’t have to come to England. Merely to become domiciled here.”

I perceived with chagrin that I had been led into a trap. Timothy’s smile, to a casual observer, might have seemed unobjectionable, even attractive. I, knowing him better, identified it at once as that smile of enigmatic complacency which signifies that he knows something I don’t about the law and is going to explain it to me. It would be irritating, heaven knows, in anyone—in a former pupil it is quite intolerable. Though a member of the Faculty of Laws, I am an historian rather than a lawyer: my interest in the principles of English law wanes with the Middle Ages. I do not doubt—for his clients’ sake I devoutly hope—that Timothy knows more than I do of modern English law: it is nothing for him to look complacent or enigmatic about.

Still, I remembered that he was buying me dinner. I allowed him, therefore, as he clearly wished to do, to give a little lecture on the law of domicile. The nub of which was, as I recall, that if you are resident in one country but intend to spend your last years in another, you will not necessarily be domiciled in either, but rather in the place where your father was domiciled at the time of your birth. If he, at that time, happened to be in a similar equivocal condition, then your domicile will be that of your paternal grandfather at the time your father was born. And so
ad infinitum,
if Timothy has explained the thing correctly, through any number of ancestors of migrant disposition, till domicile is finally established in the Garden of Eden.

In the present case, however, such extremes were not called for. His client’s grandfather, the founder of the nice little trust, had lived all his days in England and shown no desire to wander. The client’s father, though serving, when the boy was born, in the British Army in Cyprus, and married to a Greek girl, had written home numerous letters, still extant and available for inspection by the Capital Taxes Office, expressing his ultimate intention to return to England. They had both behaved, from Timothy’s point of view, admirably: it was only the client himself who was being difficult.

“But surely,” said Ragwort, “your task is very simple, Timothy. It is clear that your client has an English domicile of origin. Whenever he is not domiciled anywhere else he will be domiciled in England. If he is resident in Cyprus, all he has to do is form an intention to retire, in his declining years, to some country other than Cyprus. Paraguay or New South Wales or somewhere. He can manage that, surely.”

“And you will draft a nice letter for him,” said Selena, “explaining his intention to the Capital Taxes Office. One or two little artistic touches, to add verisimilitude, such as the purchase of a grave in the country chosen for retirement—”

“I fear,” said Timothy, “that my client has behaved foolishly. At the time of the Turkish invasion of the island, when other British residents were making haste to leave, he made several public statements, reported in the Press, declaring with some vehemence that he himself would do nothing of the kind. He would continue, he said, to run the farm which he had inherited from his mother and would devote his life to restoring the island to peace and unity.”

“‘Devote his life,’” said Selena. “Dear me, what a very unfortunate phrase.”

“Yes, isn’t it? So the Revenue are likely to be a little sceptical about his forming a sudden intention to end his days in Paraguay or New South Wales. No, I am afraid he’ll have to sell his house in Cyprus and become resident somewhere else. Somewhere, of course, where he has no intention of remaining permanently.”

It must have been, I think, at about this point that the telephone rang: there was nothing odd about that. The girl behind the bar answered it and called for Timothy: there was nothing odd about that, either—anyone wanting to communicate, at such an hour of a Friday evening, with one of the junior members of 62 New Square would do sensibly to try the Corkscrew. The telephone was too far for us to eavesdrop without effort: we had no reason to think that the effort ought to be made.

I tried, instead, to learn from Selena and Ragwort whether I too, by living in a country I did not mean to stay in and establishing a domicile in one I never meant to go to, could save myself a vast sum in capital transfer tax.

“No,” said Selena.

“No,” said Ragwort.

“Why not?” I asked, rather indignantly.

They pointed out that to save tax of £400,000 I would first have to be the heir to a fund worth a million. I conceded with regret that I was not. Neither was Selena. Neither was Ragwort. It seemed—for we had no doubt that in intellect, charm and beauty we were all more deserving than Timothy’s client—an extraordinary oversight on the part of Providence.

Timothy, concluding his telephone conversation, looked a little less cheerful than when it had begun; but he paused at the bar to buy another bottle of Nierstein.

Returning to the table, he refilled Selena’s glass. This, as it turned out, was a pity. Then he filled his own. Ragwort and I were left to fend for ourselves: a trifling discourtesy, but not like Timothy. I began to think that something must be wrong.

“That was Cantrip,” said Timothy, sitting down and addressing himself to Selena. “I’m afraid it sounds as if Julia’s in a spot of trouble.”

“She can’t be,” said Selena. “She’s still in Venice. I mean, I dare say she could be, but Cantrip couldn’t know about it.”

“Cantrip, you will remember, is working in the News Room of the
Scuttle.
The News Room is equipped with a number of teleprinter machines, which produce a continuous print-out of the reports coming in from the various international news agencies—Reuters and so on. The process, I gather, is nearly instantaneous: once a report is telephoned through to the agency, from anywhere in the world, it’s only a few minutes before it’s on the teleprinter.”

“Yes,” said Ragwort, “we know that. But what could Julia do that would interest an international news agency?”

“They seem to think,” said Timothy, looking apologetic and still addressing Selena, “that she’s stabbed someone. Fatally.”

It was, as I say, a pity that he had so recently refilled Selena’s glass, for she now released her hold on it and it dropped, almost full, on to the hard composite floor.

“I’m sorry,” said Selena. “How very clumsy of me. I don’t think, Timothy, that I have correctly understood you. What exactly do you say it said in the agency report?”

“So far as I can discover,” said Timothy, “that an English tourist has been found stabbed to death in a hotel bedroom in Venice. And that a member of the same group, Miss Julia Larwood of London, barrister, has been detained by the police for questioning.”

“Nonsense,” said Selena.

“I know,” said Timothy, still looking apologetic. “But that seems to be what it said in the report.”

“They didn’t say,” asked Ragwort, “who’s supposed to have been stabbed?”

“No. I suppose they’re waiting to tell the next of kin, if there are any. But it sounds as if it must have been one of the Art Lovers.”

“Timothy,” said Selena, “are you sure it isn’t one of Cantrip’s frightful jokes?”

“Quite sure, I’m afraid. Cantrip’s jokes, though admittedly frightful, are not as frightful as that. Besides, if it had been a joke, he would have been trying to sound serious. He wasn’t: he was trying quite hard to sound casual. He was still in the News Room, you see. I was rather confused at first. He began by asking me if I knew a bird called Julia Larwood and I said of course I knew Julia, what on earth was he talking about. To which he replied that he didn’t think I did, but he thought it was worth asking because his News Editor had suddenly got interested in her. So I gathered then that something odd was happening.”

“Are we,” asked Ragwort, “going to do anything, in particular?”

“We’re meeting in Guido’s, as arranged. Cantrip will be keeping an eye on the teleprinter, of course, and if any more news comes through before ten o’clock he’ll tell us about it.”

It is difficult, on such an occasion as I have described, to know on precisely what note to resume the conversation. We were silent for several moments.

“Dear me,” said Selena eventually. “What a very good thing, after all, Timothy, that you are going to Venice tomorrow.”

Guido’s is not the nearest restaurant to the Corkscrew, nor the most economical in that vicinity. The superiority of its menu, however, is sufficient compensation for the short walk down Holborn Kingsway and round the back of the Aldwych Theatre; and Timothy was paying the bill.

It was not yet nine o’clock: we could not expect Cantrip for at least an hour. I proposed that in the meantime, and while eating our asparagus, we should proceed, as previously intended, with the reading of Julia’s letters. Though they might throw no direct light on the stabbing incident, it would, I suggested, be useful for Timothy, before plunging
in medias res
on Julia’s behalf, to be as well-in-formed as possible of the antecedent events.

The first began ominously.

“I suppose she’s referring,” said Timothy, “to the young man she admired so much on the aeroplane. But this is evidently written only a few hours later—what can have happened in the meantime that Julia finds so shocking? She is, after all, a tolerant woman.”

“To a fault,” said Selena.