Crooked Herring (7 page)

The bar was still empty. I glanced over my shoulder and carefully unpinned the picture and slipped it into my pocket. Henry could hardly say that this trip has yielded nothing of value. This was worth a red-hot half-page review and no mistake.

I took my seat and waited for my sandwich. It was not long coming. The kitchen after all had as little to do as the barman.

‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten the pickle,’ he said. Did he glance in puzzlement at the gap on the noticeboard, or was that my imagination?

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I have all I need.’

But even as I bit into my sandwich I was thinking: the photo proves this is the right pub, but why the look of horror? What exactly had I stumbled across?

My phone rang. It was Elsie.

‘I don’t know what sort of morning you’ve had,’ she said, ‘but you’ll never believe what I’ve just discovered.’

Elsie had spoilt one of my lunches by eating it. Now she proceeded to spoil another.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘I thought it would be worth following up on Thrillseeker.’

‘In the sense that you’d hoped to find more one-star reviews?’ I was struggling to cut my sandwich and hold my phone. I needed another hand.

‘In the sense that I wondered who he was. So, I had a look at some of the discussion groups on Crispin Vynall’s books, just in case he had contributed.’

‘You didn’t look at the discussion groups on my books?’

‘I don’t think there are any.’

‘And had he commented?’

‘Yes. He was fairly active in bigging Crispin up. But there was one contribution in particular that interested me. Somebody had asked in passing whether Crispin was
planning to attend CrimeFest this year. What do you think Thrillseeker said?’

‘Yes, he is?’

‘No.’

‘No, he isn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe he’ll come?’

‘No.’

‘OK, I give up.’

‘Thrillseeker wrote: “glad you enjoyed the book –
yes, I’ll be there
– hope to see you in the bar”.’

I let this sink in. ‘So, Thrillseeker was pretending to be Crispin Vynall?’

‘No, you idiot. Thrillseeker
is
Crispin Vynall. He’d forgotten he’d signed in under that particular alias and just gave a straight answer to the question – he was going to the conference.’

‘Which means …’

‘Crispin Vynall has been giving you anonymous one-star reviews on Amazon.’

‘And …’

‘He has, conversely, also been giving himself anonymous five-star reviews. Thrillseeker is what is known in the trade as a sockpuppet – a
nom de plume
through which criticism and praise can be delivered anonymously. In this case, owned by Crispin Vynall.’

‘Untraceable,’ I said.

‘Except I did trace him,’ said Elsie with no discernible pretence of modesty.

‘But why would he give me one-star reviews?’

‘If he’s still alive, you can ask him.’

‘And if he’s dead?’

‘We’ll just have to assume that he thought you were crap.’

‘I’m shocked,’ I said.

‘Loads of people think you are crap, Ethelred. It’s not exactly breaking news.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant, I’m shocked that Crispin was giving himself favourable reviews.’

‘Everyone does it,’ said Elsie. ‘Why not? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just free publicity when you think about it. It’s just the same as your publisher putting on the back cover of one of your books: “another fascinating case for Sergeant Fairfax, which will keep you guessing right up to the last page”. Readers know it isn’t
really
true.’

‘Do they?’

‘Well, maybe
your
readers don’t realise publishers lie through their teeth, but then your readers are a bit … special.’

‘Thanks. I’m not sure it’s right to criticise other authors anonymously, though.’

‘Get real,’ said Elsie. ‘Most Amazon reviews are anonymous because most of the Internet is anonymous. That’s how teenagers get to drive each other to suicide by telling their victims that they are fat or spotty or whatever. Facebook is a more effective murder weapon than cyanide these days. Why should authors have to give their real names on the Internet when nobody else does? And you can’t ban authors from writing reviews or from being honest if they don’t like somebody’s book. What I don’t understand is
why
Vynall would want to slag off your
books online, however much he disliked them. It’s not as though you were any sort of threat to him. It makes no commercial sense to waste that amount of time on that many bad reviews.’

‘Malice?’ I suggested. ‘Spite? Envy?’

‘Not envy.’

‘No, possibly not.’

‘So what have you ever done to Crispin Vynall? Have you ever given
him
a bad review or slept with his wife or blackballed him from the Detection Club?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I hardly know him. I was once on a panel with him at Harrogate – we debated the merits of cosy versus hardboiled crime. He insisted on an audience vote at the end, which he won easily. We were also both judges for a CWA crime award – but we really only met for the final shortlisting discussion. I’ve talked to him once or twice in the bar at the Bristol CrimeFest. That’s probably a total of five hours in his company in my entire life. He’s mentioned me in passing in one or two of his reviews of other writers. I’ve never reviewed any of his books anywhere. Actually, I’ve only ever read one of them.’

‘Did you fall out over which book was to win the CWA award?’

‘Quite the reverse. I think we were in complete agreement over the shortlist and the winner.’

‘Were there any other judges or was it just the two of you?’

‘Janet Francis was the other one,’ I said.

‘Crispin’s agent?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

I was aware that Elsie did not particularly like Janet. In the event, her response was relatively mild. ‘Very cosy,’ she said. ‘You’d have been outvoted even if you had disagreed with Crispin.’

‘But I didn’t disagree,’ I said. ‘It was fine. A unanimous decision.’

‘Did you sleep with his wife, then?’ There was a note of accusation in her voice. ‘You said that you knew her. And you said it in quite a suspicious way.’

‘I met her at Harrogate one year. I give you my word that we never even discussed the possibility of sex. Crispin on the other hand was busy chatting up every woman in the bar under the age of forty. I doubt that he notices what his wife is doing.’

‘As we have observed before, he has a bit of a reputation, though my understanding is that he’d have been chatting up every girl under the age of twenty-five. So, even if you haven’t slept with his wife, did you sleep with one of his fresh-faced floozies? No, forget I asked that question. Your Facebook status is permanently stuck on Single, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t do Facebook,’ I said. ‘As for my recent love life … Well, that’s my affair. But I’m pretty confident in saying that I haven’t slept with any of Crispin’s floozies over the past two years.’

‘Meaning you haven’t had sex with anybody at all.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Of course,’ said Elsie, ‘it’s quite possible that Thrillseeker wasn’t his only sockpuppet and that you are not the only one he gave one-star reviews to. There could be dozens. In which case one of the maligned authors might have found out and …’

‘It’s a motive, I suppose. But it’s only of any relevance if Crispin is dead.’

‘What if Crispin had also been giving Henry one-star reviews and Henry found out? That would be a motive for murder, wouldn’t it?’

‘Not in my book.’

‘But maybe in Henry’s book, which sells many times what your book does.’

‘The thing that Henry has done, if he has done anything at all, seems to be a random drunken act – not calculated revenge, which he ought to know about. I suppose I could check if he does indeed have a string of one-star reviews. But Henry says he never reads Amazon reviews anyway. He doesn’t do the Internet very much.’

‘He really is your Mini-Me, isn’t he?’

‘I use the Internet all the time, Elsie. Most writers do.’

‘You didn’t know what a sockpuppet was.’

‘I’m delighted to say that I’ve never needed to know.’

‘Still, if Crispin makes a habit of trashing people’s careers, there may be dozens of people out there who want him dead.’

‘We don’t know that Crispin is dead, just that he’s missing.’

‘Why are you whispering?’

‘I’m in a pub. I don’t want to be overheard.’

‘You didn’t mind everyone hearing that you hadn’t had sex for two years.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘More or less.’

‘Wherever Crispin is, he doesn’t seem to be buried in a shallow grave up on the Downs. I’m sure that in a
couple of days’ time he’ll just show up.’

‘So what are you going to do in the meantime?’

Clearly I didn’t need to do anything, but there was something that I needed to follow up.

‘I’m going to talk to Crispin’s wife,’ I said.

‘Again? You think she may have killed him? I can’t say I’d blame her.’

‘Of course not. But, as you say, Crispin must have told her he was going somewhere – even if she suspects he’s somewhere else. There’s a good chance he’s actually gone exactly where he told her he’d gone. So, almost certainly, I’ll be able to get hold of him and confirm he’s safe. That doesn’t necessarily help us find out what Henry did that night after Crispin left him, but it will at least rule out the possibility that Henry killed Crispin.’

‘She might also know why Crispin has been giving you all of those one-star reviews.’

‘That’s not why I’m going to see her.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Of course, she’s very attractive,’ said Elsie.

‘That also has nothing to do with it,’ I said.

‘While the cat’s away—’ Elsie began.

But I hung up before she could complete whatever fatuous remark she was about to make.

Crispin and Emma lived not too far away – just on the other side of Brighton and about an hour’s drive. A quick visit would almost certainly clear up everything. And yet I paused for a moment before dialling. Of course Henry could not have killed Crispin. It was too fanciful to be
worth considering. And yet, blurred though the snapshot was, there was no mistaking the horror on Henry’s face as he realised he was about to be photographed.

I punched in the number. What I was hoping for, above everything, was that, this time, Crispin himself would answer. But deep down I knew that wasn’t what was going to happen.

It was Emma who answered the phone with a simple ‘Hello?’

‘It’s Ethelred Tressider here, again,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

‘Hi, Ethelred,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t doing anything else of interest. Fire away.’

‘Is Crispin back by any chance?’

‘Not at this precise moment,’ she said. ‘I said I’d give him your message, whatever it was.’

‘It was just to phone me.’

‘Was it? Great. I’ll pass it on. So he needs to phone somebody …’

‘Me.’

‘You. Got it. Bye then.’

For some reason I was failing to hold her attention.

‘Emma!’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t put the phone down. There was something else. I’d promised to drop off a couple of books for Crispin when I was next over your way. I’m going to be in Brighton later this afternoon, so I’ll call by at about four if you are likely to be in. Or if he will be.’

‘Just drop them through the letter box if I’m not here.’

‘They’re quite big. That’s why I thought I’d check whether you were around.’

‘Four should be fine.’

‘You’ll be there?’

‘Hang on, let me check. Where am I? Yes, I’m there all right.’

Was she being funny at my expense? Or was she genuinely unsure where she was? I thought that, on the whole, she just sounded tired and a bit pissed off. I’d find out shortly if it was me she was pissed off with.

‘I’ll see you in about an hour,’ I said.

I went into the study and took down the first two books I saw. Then I grabbed my car keys and set off.

It was in fact about four-thirty by the time I located Crispin’s house. I’m not that good with satnav to be perfectly honest. And I was still glancing too often in my rear-view mirror to concentrate properly on the road ahead. The voice giving directions sounded slightly despairing by the time that, on the third attempt, I took the correct turn off the main London road and then the second right into a road lined with trees and large red-brick houses. Crispin’s residence proved to be a large Edwardian detached villa with much cheerful ornamentation around the windows
and an overgrown garden full of glossy laurels and rhododendrons. Rain had started to fall again as I had crossed the Downs and the trees dripped on everything as I walked up the path. I tucked the books inside my jacket to protect them from the water that was beginning to soak me.

Emma Vynall opened the door to me within seconds of my ringing the bell. If she was cross with me, it wasn’t immediately apparent. ‘Come in, Ethelred,’ she said. ‘You’ll get pneumonia standing there. I’m so sorry, but you’ve had a wasted journey. It was really stupid of me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Oh dear … I’ll explain. But come into the kitchen and have some tea. It’s the least I can do under the circumstances. You’ll have to excuse the mess, I’m afraid.’

Elsie often points out that my own kitchen is a mess, meaning that the breakfast things are still in the sink at lunchtime. Emma Vynall’s kitchen was in a different league. Once the sink was full, plates and dishes had spilt out onto the draining board, marble work surfaces and the butcher’s trolley. That morning’s cereal bowl and mug (or perhaps the day before’s) was on the French cherry wood kitchen table. The rubbish bin was overflowing, as witnessed by several tea bags on the floor close by. ‘
House-proud
’ isn’t a phrase people use much now; I doubted it had ever been in Emma’s vocabulary.

‘The cleaning lady comes in tomorrow,’ she said over her shoulder as she rinsed out two mugs. She peered into one of them and gave it a quick wipe with a grubby dishcloth. ‘Would you like some cake?’

‘If you’ve got any,’ I said.

She looked inside a tin. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I did have some. It would have probably been stale. Tea it is, then.’

It was a large table in a large kitchen and we were able to find enough space at one end of it to accommodate two mugs of tea. Emma rubbed her eyes. Though dressed in jeans and a sweater, she somehow gave the impression of having just got out of bed – that she had thrown these clothes on minutes before I arrived. Her hair was tied back in an untidy blonde bunch. She wore no make-up. Even so, she was as attractive as I remembered her. She sat on the chair, one foot girlishly tucked up beneath her, the other swinging gently to and fro.

‘I’ve been stupid,’ she repeated. ‘I tried to phone you back but you must have already left the house. I don’t think you ever gave me your mobile number, so I couldn’t try that. Anyway, there’s no point at all in your leaving the books here.’

I thought for a moment that she was about to tell me that Crispin was indeed missing or even that he had been found dead, but nothing at all in her tone suggested she was leading up to that.

‘You mean …’ I began.

Emma took a deep breath. ‘Crispin moved out before Christmas,’ she said. ‘He … he and I … well, he’s gone. He’s left me.’ She waved her hand in the direction of the sink as if that explained things in some way. Perhaps it did, as some sort of allegory of blighted hopes. We both looked at the piled-up dishes for a moment. It took egg some days to dry out that much on a plate.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘No, I’m sorry. I just said come round without thinking. At some point he will have to come back and pick up his stuff. But it was only after I put the phone down that I realised that there was no point at all in your bringing the books to me if Crispin needed them urgently. So, you’ll have to hang onto them. Unless you want to leave them here until he needs some clean socks or something.’

‘But you
are
expecting him back?’ I said. ‘He’s OK?’

She looked at me oddly. ‘OK? What do you mean? Why shouldn’t he be OK? He walks out on me and you’re worried about
his
emotional state?’

‘I didn’t mean anything.’ Not a convincing response. Spoken words always mean something. As a writer’s wife she would have been told that. I wondered how much I could explain to her about Henry. He obviously was not in any sense a client because I was not in any sense being paid. Arguably, therefore, client confidentiality was not an issue. Still, I felt that some discretion was required. ‘It’s just that I’ve been trying to get in touch with him on his mobile. I was just a bit worried …’

Elsie always tells me that she can tell when I’m lying. Emma looked as though she could as well. I wondered briefly whether it wasn’t easier to tell her everything, even if that did land Henry in it. But landing Henry in it would measurably diminish the chances of the book review.

‘Yes, you said you were trying to contact him. But why were you worried?’ she asked.

‘No reason.’ I still didn’t sound convincing. I just sounded as if I had some minor psychiatric disorder that made me over-anxious from time to time. I decided to
change the subject. ‘Where did Crispin go … when he left here, I mean?’

‘To another woman, I would imagine. You see, Ethelred, he doesn’t treat women well, but he does need us. Fortunately there’s usually a good supply so, when he breaks one, he can lay his hands on a replacement fairly quickly.’

‘Do you know who he might have gone to?’

‘Excellent question. With Crispin you can’t really be sure whose harbour his prow will nudge into. Some fifteen-year-old tart probably.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘No, of course not. I’m just being a bitch. This one may be sixteen for all I know.’

‘But you knew he was having an affair?’

‘An affair? What a quaint old-fashioned term to use about a sleazy bastard schlepping his dick from bed to bed. Nothing so respectable or permanent, I suspect. Look, Ethelred, I honestly don’t know where he went. I also don’t much care where he went. And if I did know who he went to, it probably wouldn’t help you track him down. Whoever he was sleeping with on Christmas Day, I doubt if it was still the same woman on New Year’s Eve. Sorry – picturesque exaggeration. He’ll occasionally stay with the same tart for months, if he’s comfortable and he can’t be bothered to move on. But he always ditches them eventually. You know, I used to think it touching the way he took such an interest in new up-and-coming writers, until I worked out that they were all young and blonde and female. You’re not telling me you never noticed?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘He gave that CWA debut award to one of them.’

‘Mary Devlin Jones?’

‘Unless he also gave an award to one of his other young slappers. Don’t look so shocked. These things happen.’

‘I suppose so … her book was very much in his style, of course.’

‘
In his style?
Good God, Ethelred – he practically
wrote
most of it for her. Then he got her to enter it for a competition in which he was a judge. Which in turn got her a three-book deal with her first publisher, Atkins and Portas.’

‘But surely—’ I began.

‘You’re not saying this is news to you?’

‘I’d heard rumours that the novel was plagiarised, but I didn’t really believe it …’

‘It was all over the Internet for months.’

‘I do use the Internet – honestly, I do.’

‘Not that much, I’d have said. For a while it was actually trending on Twitter. That means—’

‘Yes, I know what that means.’

‘I suppose in the end the sex-for-ghost-writing wasn’t such a bad deal for either of them. Mary got her book and her contract. Crispin got what
he
wanted, by which I don’t just mean sex – he likes the unquestioning adulation too. And the prize had to go somewhere. You could call it win-win. Of course, Crispin dumped her by the time she was halfway through the second book. Atkins and Portas were reportedly a little puzzled by the falling off in the quality of her later work. The third book was however quite interesting in the sense that it was about a woman who gets betrayed by a best-seller crime writer and then
tracks him down and gets her revenge. It was so gory they almost didn’t bring it out. It takes from page 173 to page 349 for him to die. Then the plagiarism rumours started to circulate and Atkins and Portas went cold on the whole Mary Devlin Jones thing. After that she switched to writing cozies for another publisher entirely. They’re about an octogenarian amateur detective with half a dozen cats who help her in her cases. You occasionally see them in bookshops. I actually read one. You really have to like cats to see any point in it all. One of the cats is called Hercule by the way. He spends a lot of time purring and licking his own arse. Crispin would have been a better name.’

‘You don’t have any cats yourself?’

‘I might have to get one or two. We’ll see how it goes. I’m a crap tea-maker by the way. Why don’t we switch to red wine. I’ve got a bottle open. And if I haven’t, I’ve got a corkscrew.’

I realised that her appearance was not so much of somebody who has just got up as somebody who has been drinking steadily and carefully since shortly before breakfast.

‘Coffee might be better for both of us,’ I said. ‘Shall I get us some?’

Emma laughed. ‘That’s exactly what you said to me at Harrogate,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘In the bar of the Old Swan, when I tried to pick you up.’

‘You tried to pick me up?’

‘You didn’t realise I was asking you to come to bed with me? Good grief! There was me thinking how gentlemanly
you’d been about the whole thing, chatting away in the bar and resisting the temptation to accept my offer – whereas in practice I’d just been too drunk to make it clear I was an easy lay.’

‘But Crispin was there in the bar …’

‘I was scarcely expecting to see him back in his own bed when there were other beds to go to. I doubt he even noticed us ensconced there in the corner, or registered you seeing me back to my room.’

‘So I did. I’d forgotten that. Just a peck on the cheek, then, after I made sure you’d got the right bedroom?’

‘You got me a nice cup of coffee. Then we chatted for a bit in a quiet corner of Reception – all very cosy and promising, as I thought. Then you saw me back to my room. I believe we shook hands in the corridor. Or maybe I’m making that bit up. I can’t recall. Perhaps it’s as well I can’t. It clearly wasn’t my finest performance as a seductress.’

‘I remember it as a very pleasant evening.’

Emma burst out laughing. ‘Very pleasant? If you say so. Just out of interest, would you have slept with me, if I’d communicated better?’

That seemed a question fraught with all sorts of dangers.

‘Do you think Crispin did notice us? Did he think maybe that we did sleep together?’

‘It wouldn’t have bothered him.’

‘You don’t think he might have resented it?’

‘Not a chance.’

I pondered this for a bit.

‘Did he ever mention me at all? I mean, in any context?’

Emma frowned. ‘Ethelred, you spurned my advances
but you seem very concerned about whether you were constantly in my husband’s thoughts. I’m not quite sure what to make of this but I have to warn you that Crispin is as heterosexual as it is possible to be. And you’re about thirty years too old for him anyway.’

‘Oh sorry … I didn’t mean …’

She raised an eyebrow. It was time to change the subject.

‘Do you know a writer called Henry Holiday?’ I asked.

Emma turned and looked across the room at the unwashed dishes. For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard my question, then I saw she was frowning, as if trying to recall something. ‘Sort of … I mean, I’ve spoken to him … He’s a drinking buddy of Crispin’s in a minor way. I don’t think they’re great friends, exactly, but they tend to occupy the same bit of the bar at conferences and confide in each other, the way you do at three o’clock in the morning.’

‘And they saw each other down here in Sussex? Henry lives close to where I do in West Wittering.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think they met up much other than at Bristol and Harrogate or Crime in the Court. But, as you will gather, I didn’t always know exactly where Crispin was.’

‘No. I suppose not. You implied that Crispin was … well … into underage girls. Is that really true?’

‘That was probably the booze talking. The booze has a very low opinion of my husband. Crispin’s other women have all tended to be on the young side, but even I wouldn’t want to accuse him of being a paedo. Crispin’s general technique, you see, was to offer whichever silly girl it was some sound middle-aged advice and assistance with their
careers, while nudging her gently towards his bed – or any other reasonably flat surface. You don’t get many teenage writers, so most of them tended to be in their twenties or early thirties, often from one of the creative writing courses he taught on. Anyway, I may be drunk, but I have noticed you’re asking a lot of questions for somebody who is supposed to be dropping off a couple of books.’