Crooked Herring (4 page)

The note had been put through my letter box during the night. It had certainly not been there when I locked the door at around eleven-thirty. But by seven it was on the doormat. A plain white envelope with my name inscribed in block capitals.

I picked it up, thinking that it might be from the estate management committee, with a bill for my share of the maintenance of the road or a reminder to take in our rubbish bins after they had been emptied. But it wasn’t. The letter was also written entirely in capitals, as if by a backward but extremely vindictive seven-year-old. It read:

Not from the estate management committee, then.

It was rather as though fate, having built up the tension for a while, had decided to throw a couple of clowns onto the stage. Of course, Shakespeare did it all the time in his plays. It was just that it didn’t happen much in West Wittering. I needed some down-to-earth advice. I decided it was time I phoned my agent.

‘This had better be good, Tressider,’ Elsie said before I had a chance to speak.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Because my phone told me. Jesus, Ethelred, don’t you know that ninety-nine point nine nine nine per cent of phones tell you who is calling before you pick up? Probably not. I expect you still have one of those phones attached to the wall with a little handle that you turn to alert the operator that you wish to speak to somebody. And not in an ironic postmodern way.’

‘Oh yes, sorry, of course. I think my iPhone does that too.’

‘It does. Trust me. Anyway, it’s seven-fifteen. Couldn’t you practise using your iPhone when people are awake?’

‘Sorry, I imagined you’d be up and about by now. I
just wanted to talk something through with you. A death threat actually.’

‘Against you or me?’

‘Me.’

‘Office hours are ten to five-thirty, Monday to Thursday, except in cases of emergency.’

‘It’s a
death
threat, Elsie.’

‘When you say “death”… how specific is it?’

‘Well, you could say that it was somewhat provisional – it applies only under certain circumstances – if I do certain things.’

‘Can you hold off doing any of them until, say, nine thirty-one?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll call you back once I’ve had a shower and breakfast.’

‘My mobile number is …’

‘It’s staring me in the face, Ethelred. Shall I explain again about this thing where you can see from the screen who is calling you?’

‘No. I think I’ve got the hang of it.’

‘I’ll phone you right back. Right-ish back, anyway.’

It was ten-thirty by the time Elsie had cleared her desk of matters more important than my impending death.

‘Sorry – it just sort of slipped my mind,’ she said. ‘You’re still alive, anyway, so no real harm done. Now, tell me all about it.’

I told her all about most of it.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It would be worth trying to get a review in the
Telegraph
. Not easy for a writer like you.’

‘I may end up dead as a result.’

‘Yes, but you’ll have a review in the
Telegraph
.’

‘I’ll have an obituary in the
Telegraph
,’ I said.

‘Oh no,’ said Elsie, ‘I doubt they’d do that. You have to be well known.’

Elsie had frequently explained to me that it was important to have an agent who was your strongest supporter and advocate. Sadly, she probably was.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ I asked.

‘Look, why don’t I drop in later today? I’ll take a look at that note.’

‘Aren’t you needed in London?’

‘There’s another writer I represent in Selsey. I was going to see her. I could call in on you.’

‘You don’t have any writers in Selsey. It’s only a few miles away. I’d know them.’

‘Is it? I still might have taken on somebody there without your knowing.’

‘But you haven’t.’

‘I might.’

‘Not in real life, Elsie.’

There was a pause as Elsie decided whether she could be bothered to continue lying. She was anxious to interfere in my life and nothing I could say would stop her. Even if I could prove that there were no writers of any sort in Selsey and that there never had been, it would be an empty victory. She was coming to West Wittering. Eventually she just said: ‘Thanks, by the way, for your Christmas present. You shouldn’t have.’

‘My pleasure. I’m glad you found it useful.’

‘I didn’t say I found it useful. I said: “you shouldn’t
have”. I might have added that I had no idea they still made them. Quaint. Anyway, I have started using it in an entirely ironic manner. Now, are there any decent restaurants in West Wittering? I shall need feeding.’

‘There’s the Beach House,’ I said, ‘that’s good. And the Old House at Home does excellent pub food. You can get a nice sandwich or a croissant at the Landing.’

‘I’ll see you for a late lunch, then. Your choice of venue.’

‘Elsie,’ I said, ‘are you coming to West Wittering because you are concerned about my safety or to meddle in my business?’

‘Entirely for your safety. As for meddling in your business, surely you phoned me? I wouldn’t describe answering the phone as meddling with anything.’

‘I merely phoned you for advice.’

‘Which I can give much more easily if I have a chance to discuss it with you properly over a low-calorie meal. There is a danger that without my advice you may get involved in something that would place you completely out of your depth.’

‘And with your advice? What might happen then?’

‘One step at a time, Ethelred. You decide where you’re going to buy me lunch. I’ll let you know what happens after that.’

Friday 4 January Joy! Ethelred has given me a large
leather-bound
book with ruled pages for Christmas. Suitable, it says on the box, as a diary or perhaps for writing a first novel. With regard to the diary aspect, Ethelred presumably hasn’t noticed that, for the past ten years, whenever I’ve had to record an appointment, I’ve done so in some neat electronic device. He hasn’t investigated his own iPhone sufficiently to discover that it has a Calendar function amongst other things. So, he’s given me half a kilo of heavy-duty paper bound in another half-kilo of leather from a cow that most certainly died in vain as far as I am concerned. Or perhaps Ethelred thinks that, like Samuel Pepys, I plan to sit down at the end of every day and write up my deeds, with passing reference to any major fires or plagues that happen to be going on. Bless.

Of course, it’s a well-meaning gift in the sense that he
has given me the sort of thing he would love himself – something totally useless but happily reminiscent of the days of his youth, when cricket was much better and the sun shone all summer long. Possibly I should have kept it and given it back to him next year as his Christmas present, but sadly I have now written in it, so that may not be as good an option as it was ten minutes ago.

Anyway, since no plagues happened this morning and the Dutch are not burning the English fleet in the Medway, let me record the one item of news that I have: Ethelred has coincidentally just phoned me to say that he has an interesting new case that he would love to involve me in. It’s touching the way he feels I can contribute, adding my experience, intelligence and intuition to whatever it is he thinks he brings to the party.

It is a while since Ethelred and I dipped our toes into a bit of real-life detective work. The only question, to my mind, is why we should help out a supercilious little prat like Henry Holiday. A review in a quality daily is an obvious incentive, but will it be a good review? I’ve caught Holiday more than once making snide remarks about Ethelred in the bar at the Harrogate crime festival. The fact that they were absolutely true, and we all agreed with him, didn’t stop them from being very unpleasant. Holiday could lead Ethelred on with promises of reviews, only to rubbish him or (standard reviewer’s excuse) say that he wrote a glowing review but the editor spiked it. Ethelred, who believes all to be as honest as he, tends not to see shit like that coming. Anyway, why should Holiday want Ethelred to help him if his estimation of Ethelred’s ability is really as low as he has previously implied? It suggests a
degree of desperation or that there is something about the case that even I have missed.

And then there’s Vynall. An even nastier piece of work. Slags off anyone he sees as being a rival. Why? He’s making pots of money with his latest gore-fest. He’s on
Front Row
. His books are everywhere. He doesn’t need to be any more unpleasant than he wishes. He can, conversely, be very obliging indeed if you happen to be an attractive and slightly too trusting young girl. He knows better than to try it on with me, of course.

So, I’m off shortly to have lunch with Ethelred and, purely in passing, to advise him on the Strange Affair of the Forgetful Author (as I plan to call it when we write it up). For the moment the only choice I have to make is between a small green salad and soup of the day (no bread).

It was half past two. We were ensconced in the Old House at Home with the death threat in front of us on the table. Somehow, sandwiched between a plate of scampi (mine) and a small green salad and quadruple portion of
double-fried
chips (Elsie’s) the message looked less significant than it had in the half-light of my early-morning hallway.

Elsie’s plump frame was squashed into a smoker’s chair. Short of stature and well-rounded, she might almost have been Henry’s twin. She had chosen a costume that in some ways mirrored Henry’s bow tie and waistcoat – a very fifties frock in bright pink with many petticoats supporting the skirt, a short white cardigan and bright-red lipstick to complete the effect. A pair of sunglasses, which she would not need until late April, were perched on her head. It was the Sunday colour supplements’ idea of what to wear at the seaside. But not in January.

‘Feel free to help yourself to salad,’ said Elsie. ‘I think I may have ordered too much. A little lettuce goes a long way. Unless you’re a rabbit.’

‘I’m good,’ I said.

‘Do you mean that you are leading a blameless life, or are you trying to talk like a young person?’

‘Eat your salad and stay away from my chips,’ I said.

She looked at my scampi and chips and shook her head at the amount of food I was proposing to eat. To be fair, she had very few chips remaining on her own plate.

‘It’s an odd letter,’ she said.

‘Semi-literate,’ I said. ‘See how they’ve spelt “wot” and “inn”. I blame the abolition of grammar schools.’

We looked at it again.

‘Don’t you think the spelling mistakes are deliberate?’ she asked. ‘Whoever wrote it knows the difference between “it’s” and “its”. And it’s one of the few death threats I’ve
seen that includes semicolons. Grammatically it’s fine, with a few spelling mistakes added later to throw us off the scent.’

‘To throw
me
off the scent,’ I said. ‘I don’t think anyone envisaged your ever being on the scent.’

‘How wrong they were, eh?’ said Elsie, through a mouthful of my chips.

‘And they’ve misspelt my name,’ I said.

‘Easily done if you’re not terribly familiar with it,’ said Elsie. ‘So, there are two questions: who wrote it and who are we supposed to think wrote it?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘The threats, now I reread it, are remarkably vague. But whoever it is is remarkably well informed. Henry must have told somebody he was consulting me – I’ve certainly told nobody except you.’

‘Well, it obviously wasn’t me because you didn’t tell me until this morning. I’d have sent you the death threat via Facebook, anyway. That’s the way it’s done now.’

‘Somebody out there doesn’t like Henry, that’s for sure.’

‘It’s because he’s a nasty little toerag,’ said Elsie. She selected another chip from my plate.

‘Henry’s a friend,’ I said. ‘Well, sort of.’

‘I’ve always found him an irritating shit. Take the way he dresses …’

‘I can’t see anything wrong with the way he dresses …’

‘He dresses exactly the way you do, Ethelred, but he’s thirty years younger.’

‘Twenty years younger.’

Elsie shook her head. ‘That still doesn’t make it
right
, does it? You wear tweed jackets because you were made to wear them when you were in your pram, and nobody has
ever explained to you that you are now permitted to go around in a sweatshirt and jeans. But for Henry they are a pure affectation. Then there’s all this business with blood sports and the countryside, when everyone knows he grew up in Putney or Pinner or somewhere. He’s a cheap replica of you, only six inches shorter.’

That was possibly true. Hadn’t the assistant manager of the club said much the same thing?

‘You think he sees me as a role model?’ I asked.

‘I hope not – not if he wants to make a living out of writing. I just think it’s creepy.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘My pleasure. Henry does resemble you in one other way, though – he wanted to write a great literary novel.’

‘Nothing wrong with that either.’

‘The difference though is that he did write one, rather than just talk about it. He apparently penned a brilliant crime novel of great literary distinction.’

‘Which one was that?’ I asked. I wasn’t being facetious. Henry had published his first crime novel only a few years before, but his output since then had been prolific. People admired his ability to churn out page-turning thrillers. But nobody had ever mentioned the word ‘literary’ before in the same sentence as the words Henry Holiday.

‘I don’t know the whole story,’ said Elsie. ‘Somebody mentioned it in the bar at a conference, the way you do. Apparently Henry spent about ten years working on his first novel. Then it got completely trashed by some critic or other.’

‘So it was published? I thought—’

‘No, it never saw the light of day. He showed the
manuscript to this big-shot critic. The critic told him that his life’s work was rubbish, and so Henry destroyed it – burnt the paper, wiped the discs. The following morning he sat down and started to write the sort of garbage that makes him so much money now.’

‘So, if it’s destroyed how does anybody know it’s a great literary work?’

‘Because Henry says it was. It seems that God subsequently revealed unto Henry Holiday in a vision that the big-shot critic was actually a tosser who had no idea what he was talking about. The scales fell from his eyes. Henry’s tried a couple of times to rewrite it, but it’s gone for good – the plot and the characters are there but not the thing that made it the finest book of all time.’

‘Who told you all that? Henry?’

‘No. I think it was his editor or agent. Or maybe his publicist. At a conference at three o’clock in the morning these things blur a bit – you know that terrible hour when the bar has stopped serving drinks but you can’t quite face the task of asking Reception to remind you what your name is and which room number you are in. But the origin was Henry himself who’d told it to this publicist or maybe to a friend of hers or perhaps to her friend’s mother on a very similar occasion at a very similar event. He was weeping genuine tears into an empty glass – that much is certain – though you have to allow for a little picturesque exaggeration in these stories.’

‘That’s sad,’ I said.

‘In a way. Had the great literary novel been published, then he’d have been scraping a living, getting brilliant reviews and selling a few thousand copies. As it is, he’s on
his way to becoming the next Crispin Vynall. Not before time, since you say the first one has been murdered.’

‘I certainly didn’t say that. I think Crispin’s absence is only temporary. It’s just a bit inconvenient for Henry because Crispin might just be able to tell us what Henry was doing.’

‘Only if he’s still alive,’ said Elsie.

‘Henry certainly didn’t kill him.’

‘But Henry was drunk and thinks he may have killed
somebody
.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Crispin’s vanished.’

‘Yes.’

‘All of which is consistent with Henry killing Crispin.’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t keep saying “yes” like that, Ethelred. It’s irritating. Say something with more than one syllable.’

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s only marginally better.’

‘If Crispin was dead, Emma would have noticed.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘I’m not joking.’

‘Nor am I. Who knows what Crispin told Emma or where he said he was going? If only half the things I’ve heard about him are true, he must have been constantly making up stories to explain an absence for a night or two. That she’s not concerned doesn’t mean that all is well. And if she only half-believed the latest story, it might explain why she wasn’t going to make a fool of herself by telling you he’d been at a book fair in Amsterdam for the past week, or whatever lie he’d sold her, when you might
know exactly whose bed he’d been in.’

‘So, who’s the letter from?’

‘Did anybody other than Henry even know you were on the case?’

‘Nobody at all. I told you that.’

‘That’s not quite true, in the sense that you’ve been clumping round the country asking everyone whether they’ve seen a short, pompous crime writer murdering one of his mates.’

‘Fair enough. Denzil at the pub knows I was asking questions. And I did tell the man at the club that I was a private detective, and I did give him my phone number.’

‘And Emma. She might have guessed from your clumsy attempts at detective work that something was going on.’

‘I scarcely think this was written by Emma. Denzil, maybe, if he can write at all.’

‘Could Henry have told anyone else he was employing you?’

‘It would be an odd thing to do under the circumstances.’

‘Could you have been followed, then?’

‘Yes, easily; but how would anyone have known I was worth following?’

Elsie chewed one of my chips thoughtfully. ‘You’re right. None of this makes sense. To want you off the case somebody has to know you’re on it. And even if they did, why would they want you off?’

‘Because I might be about to come up with something that would clear Henry and put the blame firmly on somebody else?’ I suggested.

‘But that would assume they thought you were in some way a competent investigator … That’s yummy, by the way.’

‘Yes, but I wish you wouldn’t do it.’

My agent had been assisting her thought train by squirting large amounts of tomato ketchup on my plate and then dipping my remaining chips into it one by one.

‘Shame to waste them,’ she said, stuffing three chips into her mouth very quickly.

‘I wasn’t wasting them,’ I said. ‘I had plans for them that didn’t involve ketchup.’

‘Prevention is better than cure,’ said Elsie vaguely. ‘We have to assume that, while you investigate on Henry’s behalf, somebody out there who has a very strong interest in the case is carrying out their own investigations, and doing their best to put a spoke in yours.’

‘Possibly,’ I said.

‘Of course, if I were married to Crispin, I’d murder him, then cover things up with an elaborate but foolproof stratagem, almost certainly involving phony death threats.’

‘But you’re not married to him. Emma is.’

‘You know her well?’ Elsie paused, chip in hand, scrutinising me more than I would have wished.

‘I’ve met her. Maybe once or twice.’

‘So have I. She’s quite attractive. Definitely your type.’

‘As I say, I might have talked to her once,’ I said. ‘Or possibly twice. She sometimes goes to conferences with Crispin. You get talking to people in bars. Quite innocently. Anyway, returning to the subject in hand, if Crispin really has vanished, then the police will soon have to be involved. Taking me out of the equation doesn’t really help. I don’t want any more of that stuff on my plate by the way.’

‘Yes you do. They’re really good chips and this is really good sauce. I didn’t know you got artisanal ketchup this far out of Hampstead. Still, it’s true what you say. You’d rather expect the police to be at least as good as you at solving murders. Of course, the entire premise of the amateur detective novel is that the main character has some special skill – a knowledge of local history or Sudoku or quilting, say – that gives them an insight into crime that a lifetime of mere police work can never match. Perhaps that is how we should approach this problem. What special abilities do you have, Ethelred?’

‘I’m a crime writer,’ I said.

Elsie patted my hand. ‘I know,’ she said sympathetically, ‘but you must have some useful skills.’

‘I’ve developed my proficiency in logical deduction.’

‘Not according to the last review I saw on Amazon,’ said Elsie.

‘Was that one of Thrillseeker’s reviews by any chance?’

‘Who?’

‘I was reading them last night. It’s the Amazon
nom de plume
of somebody out there who dislikes my books very much. He seems determined to read all of them so that he can post on Amazon how much he hates them. He doesn’t think I can do logical deduction or anything else. He usually gives me one star.’

‘That’s harsh. Most of them are worth at least two.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Well, some of them, anyway. Does he actually buy the books?’

‘He seems to have read them. All of them.’

‘A fan of sorts, then. I’ll check him out,’ said Elsie. ‘So this murder …’

‘If there has been one, which I still doubt.’

‘… if there has been one, which you still doubt … has been committed for some reason that a crime writer would understand but not a policeman. Hence wanting the crime writer off the case.’

‘You’re talking as if we’re in a novel,’ I said. ‘You’re assuming that the whole thing has been set up in a particular way and that we can draw inferences from every tiny detail. Actually things don’t work like that in real life. In an actual murder inquiry, most things are just irrelevant background noise. So, there’s no point in looking for the special skills that I have.’

‘You don’t do quilting, I suppose?’ asked Elsie.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Beekeeping?’

‘That was Sherlock Holmes.’

‘So it was. Well, if you are really determined to help Henry, what we need to do next is to establish where this church is.’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’m
not
determined to help him – quite the reverse – I’ve told him I’ve quit. And somebody is threatening to kill me if I continue.’

‘Not specifically,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s a bit vague. Hardly a threat at all. This is designed to mildly frighten you – that’s all. Let’s remember he – or she – uses semicolons. Who worries about grammar when writing a real death threat? I’d have said there was a forty to fifty per cent chance they were bluffing.’