The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell Page A

to be terribly cross.”
    “Oh dear,” said Selena.
    TELEX M. CANTRIP TO J, LARWOOD TRANSMITTED SARK 6:15 P.M. MONDAY 30TH APRIL
       Yoo-hoo there, Larwood, guess who? Me again, unforeseenly Sark-stuck. Tell Henry hard cheese on West London County Court, they’ll have to make do with Ragwort.
    If Henry thinks I did it on purpose, you might point out that Sark isn’t exactly a major centre of exciting and sophisticated entertainment—just a flat-topped lump of rock in the middle of nowhere, with not much to do unless you’ve got a big thingabout sea gulls. Gabrielle says it’s like the Garden of Eden, but there wasn’t much to do there either, was there? Except for eating apples.
    Anyway, the way I see it, it’s all Darkside’s fault. The plane to Guernsey made him feel sick and the boat to Sark made him feel sicker and the horse and carriage made him feel sickest of the lot. If Henry thinks it can’t take long to get anywhere on an island three miles by one, tell him to try doing it in a horse-drawn carriage sitting next to a chartered accountant who looks like a corpse with liver trouble and groans every time the horse starts to trot a bit.
    We had to amble along at about one mph, getting plenty of time to look at the butterflies and wild-flowers and wave graciously at the passing peasantry. Passing, in view of our speed, was something the peasantry did pretty easily, including an old biddy wrapped up in black shawls just like the one in the Grand Hotel the other evening—don’t suppose it was the same one, though.
    What with the sun shining and the birds singing and so on, I wouldn’t actually have minded much about going slowly, except I was worried about Gabrielle being on her own somewhere with chaps from the Revenue lurking in the undergrowth.
    Philip Alexandre hangs out on the part of the island called Little Sark—almost a separate island, just joined up to the rest by a long thin bit called the Coupee, like a kind of bridge about a hundred yards long, with a three-hundred-foot drop on both sides and railings to stop you falling over. It’s just about wide enough for a carriage, though not with much room to spare, but they’re not allowedto take passengers across it, so we had to get out and walk.
    Even that took quite a lot longer than it might have done, because the chap driving the carriage thought this was the right time to fill us in on the local spookery and witchcraft statistics. He’s a boozy-looking character called Albert, who works for Philip Alexandre as a sort of general handyman, and he seems to think he’s got a patriotic duty to tell everyone there are more ghosts and witches per square foot on Little Sark than anywhere else in the Channel Islands, and more at the Hotel Alexandra than at the Sablonnerie down the road.
    On Halloween and nights like that, he says, the Devil used to ride across the Coupee in a big black coffin, and the witches used to fly over from Guernsey on their broomsticks and dance on the beach with no clothes on. He’s not sure if they still do it, but he thinks if they don’t, it’s because of television.
    Edward Malvoisin and Clemmie started ragging each other about it, with him saying that witches were all rot and her saying they weren’t and her betting him he wouldn’t dare walk across the Coupee at midnight and him betting her he would.
    Darkside came back from the dead enough to say we hadn’t come all this way at great trouble and expense, etc., to talk a lot of nonsense about witches. Ardmore said if we could get in touch with the ghost of the settlor and ask it what to do with the trust fund, that would solve all our problems. When Darkside worked out this was a joke he decided to feel sick again and not be well enough to go on for quite a long time.
    So that’s how we didn’t get to Philip Alexandre’s place until nearly midday. It’s really just a farmhouse, but he’s added a few extra bathrooms and a cocktail bar and calls it the Hotel