The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell Page B

Alexandra.
    The bar was looking a good bit more stylish than it would normally have done on account of having Gabrielle in it, sitting on a high stool and drinking champagne—it’s funny how seeing Gabrielle in a place makes it feel all sort of Parisian. The chap behind the bar, doing a lot less for the decor, was Philip Alexandre himself—he’s a skinny old chap who looks as if he’d been pickled in walnut juice for about a hundred years, but quite genial when you get to know him. They were chatting away together in that funny kind of Frogspeak people talk here and didn’t seem to have been missing us at all.
    Plan A had been to have the board meeting and then a spot of lunch and be driven back in time to catch the 3:30 boat to Guernsey. I thought at first we might still manage it that way, as long as people didn’t talk too much at the board meeting, but that was before they told me that they had to get through 126 other board meetings as well as the Daffodil one.
    One two six, just in case you think I’ve mistyped it. That’s because Patrick and Gabrielle have set up Sark resident companies for 126 different clients and they all have to prove that this is where the board of directors take their decisions.
    Plan B was skipping lunch, proposed by Darkside and not finding a seconder.
    Plan C was to have lunch first, then the board meetings, and then drive back in time for the 5:30boat to Guernsey. It worked pretty well, up to a point—I mean, it was a jolly good lunch.
    They didn’t need me for the first 126 board meetings, so I went and sat in the garden and read a book. There’s a stack of old novels in the dining room by a chap called John Oxenham, and I borrowed one called
Perilous Lovers
.
    It’s all about Sark in the old days, when there wasn’t anyone living here—just the witches flying over from Guernsey for the occasional orgy. The heroine’s called Clare of Belfontaine and she’s married to a frightful rotter who’s madly jealous about her and has her cast away on Sark without any clothes, absolutely not a stitch, but she makes herself a sort of skirt out of bracken. Bet you couldn’t do that.
    It’s a pity our book’s not about the old days when people did things like that—it would make it a lot easier to put in exciting bits. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it, and what I think we need is some sort of extra interest for Carruthers on the romantic side. I mean, it’s all right him fancying Eliane in a way, and marrying her after she turns out to be an heiress, because we want to have a happy ending. But the way I see it is that under all the suavity and daredevil charm, he’s a tremendously sensitive sort of chap who thinks pretty deeply about things, and I don’t see Eliane as the kind of bird who’s going to appreciate that side of him.
    So what I thought was that there ought to be some other bird that he’s got a tremendous thing about on a sort of spiritual level, and it can’t ever come to anything because she’s married or something,but deep down she’s the only person who really understands him. She’d be quite a lot older than him, but sort of ageless and a bit mysterious, like the Moaning Lizzie—not miserable, though, a frightfully good sport, and laughing a lot at things.
    Where was I? Oh yes, waiting to go on in my big scene as Counsel advising on the Daffodil problem. Which when it came didn’t exactly go like a breeze, because what I told them was that if they couldn’t exercise their discretion the way the settlor wanted them to, and they wouldn’t exercise it any other way, the descendants of the Palgrave chap were going to scoop the jackpot, so they’d better start finding out who they were.
    I knew they wouldn’t like it and they didn’t. They were still arguing the toss about it when someone noticed it was quarter to five and time we were on our way back to the harbour. So we looked round for Albert and the carriage and there they weren’t. He’d taken