Crooked Herring

Some locations mentioned in the book, such as London, are real enough. Others, such as Didling Green, are amalgamations of various places, the originals having proved less convenient for the perfect crime than one might wish. All of the characters are, to the best of my knowledge, completely fictional. The paint colours mentioned in Chapter One do however all appear on the Farrow & Ball chart, an example of fact being stranger than fiction.

I’ve never seen the value of prologues.

Most people skip them anyway, thumb-flicking the pages to reach something that is clearly the beginning of a coherent narrative, not the rambling and deliberately obscure perorations of an author trying clumsily to bulk out a thin manuscript. And what else is a prologue for other than to delay the beginning of the real story? The thing you have paid good money to get your hands on?

And yet … and yet, having drafted and reread the strange account of my most recent case, I do feel that it requires some sort of introduction. Some explanation, for example, of why Elsie is not my co-narrator in quite the way she has been (since I have never found a way of preventing it) in all of the past accounts of my detective work.

It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write
these, the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend and sometime literary agent, Ms Elsie Thirkettle, was distinguished. It will never be possible for her to intrude on the narrative again. Since her role in the case in question was, however, significant – and her duplicity vast even by her own challenging standards – she should be heard from. Fortunately Elsie left behind a diary with notes covering roughly the period in question and I have quoted freely from it. She also left a tape of various conversations that she had covertly recorded, and I have transcribed these as necessary. You should read these sections with an open mind and judge her no more harshly than she richly deserves.

As for my own conduct, I have nothing to be ashamed of – even my actions at the very end of the case, which you will see were wholly justified. I think you will agree that I could not have done otherwise. My career as an amateur detective has been strewn with red herrings of one sort or another, but rarely have they been laid as thickly and unkindly as in the case I am about to relate. One crooked herring after another has, you might say, been deliberately laid in my path by people whom I had every reason to trust. Or at least, by people who should have known better.

But what is the point of my making excuses in a part of the book that hardly anyone will read? Very well. There is no avoiding it. Let the whole sorry story begin.

It is always a mistake to confess to murder while wearing a paisley bow tie.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ asked Henry.

‘That you have just killed somebody?’ I asked.

‘That I
might
have killed somebody,’ he said. He looked a little sheepish. The genuine murderer – the real pro – tends to keep track of that sort of thing.

And he wasn’t dressed for murder. The tweed jacket, the checked waistcoat, and above all the yellow bow tie … they spoke of a man who would fiddle his expenses and arrange for his pregnant secretary to have a sordid backstreet abortion. They would have enabled Henry to audition as an extra in a fifties costume drama – a dodgy bookmaker, say, or a ne’er-do-well younger brother destined for exile to one of the more obscure colonies. They were not clothes that you would risk wearing for a
murder. Far too stiff. Far too formal. Far too memorable. In any case, Henry was, like me, a crime writer, and was aware of the main objection to a confession, even on a provisional basis.

‘This isn’t how it’s done,’ I said. ‘The correct order of things is the discovery of a body, the examination of the evidence, a progressive elimination of suspects and then an arrest. Your leaping straight to an admission of guilt is confusing. At least for me.’

Henry’s look implied that a lot of things were confusing for me.

‘This isn’t one of your stupid amateur detective novels, Ethelred. There’s no rule that says we have to start with twelve equally likely suspects. It isn’t even necessary for us to assemble in the drawing room so that I can break down and admit everything. Anyway, I’m not saying that I
have
murdered somebody – simply that I
may
have done. And I’d rather hoped you would take me seriously. It is possible, Ethelred, that at this very moment there is somebody lying dead out there and that I may have killed him. I need your help. You’re a crime writer. I would have thought you would have leapt at the chance to investigate a crime for real.’

‘I have investigated crimes for real,’ I said. ‘I’m crap at it.’

‘Call it research, then.’

‘I write police procedurals,’ I said. ‘Not amateur detective novels, which are an entirely separate subgenre, with their own quirks and clichés. And, contrary to what you appear to believe, I do not invariably have twelve suspects. Ten is usually plenty.’

Occasionally I succeed in being funny. Henry’s look told me that this was one of the other times.

‘For goodness’ sake, Ethelred, I said I needed help, not your pathetic attempts at humour. If you came to me and said you’d committed some terrible crime, I’d at least listen with a straight face.’

This was true. I was having great difficulty in taking Henry seriously. And it wasn’t just the tie. He was somewhat younger than I am but often affected the manners of somebody considerably older than both of us. Yellow bow ties, for example. And those checked waistcoats with their rounded lapels and multiple pockets. He also had a rather arch manner of addressing me that I frankly resented. Pomposity in the elderly is regrettable, but in the young it is rarely other than ridiculous. Henry was moreover quite short. His face was red and shiny. Of course, none of these things proved conclusively that he was not a murderer. It’s just that I knew he wasn’t one, however much he might have preferred to the contrary.

I tried to straighten my face as best I could. ‘I’m listening,’ I said.

‘To begin at the beginning,’ said Henry, speaking very slowly and carefully, as if to an idiot, ‘I had a bit of a skinful on New Year’s Eve. We started drinking at the Old House at Home, just round the corner from here. Then we drove into Chichester and drank at some sort of nightclub for people too young to know better. It claimed to be holding a New Year school disco, but the uniforms were unlike any school I have ever been to. Later I remember being in a country pub, but I’ve no idea how I got there. The only other clear recollection
was waking up in the early hours of the morning in my own bed and thinking: “Oh, my God! I’ve killed somebody!”’

‘And then?’ I asked.

‘I went back to sleep,’ said Henry.

I took a deep breath. It did not require much knowledge of criminal investigation to deduce that Henry had gone to bed drunk and had a nightmare.

‘You went to bed drunk and had a nightmare,’ I said. ‘Case closed. Do you fancy a whisky before you go?’

Henry shook his head wearily. ‘And the knotted rope?’ he asked. ‘How does that fit in with it being a nightmare?’

‘This is the first I’ve heard of a knotted rope,’ I said.

‘I was coming to that when you started on your deranged theories about the number of suspects needed for a murder inquiry. In the boot of my car, I found a length of rope. What do you think of that?’

‘The boot of my car is full of all sorts of junk. Like most people, I rarely bother to clear it out. Your boot is probably much the same. You just picked it up somewhere, perhaps months or years ago, to use as a tow rope …’

‘It was about three feet long and much too thin to tow even a modestly priced car.’

‘That still doesn’t make it a murder weapon. Most bits of rope never get to kill anyone.’

‘And I was covered in scratches.’

‘From the rope?’

‘Of course not, you idiot. I mean that I must have been in a fight or something.’

‘All right, you got drunk, fell over, cut yourself, went
to bed, had a nightmare and woke up to discover some superficial injuries. Antiseptic ointment is sometimes helpful under those circumstances. I probably have some in the bathroom.’

I have to make it clear that people
do
sometimes laugh at my jokes, but we had a difficult audience in tonight. Henry’s expression was glacial.

‘I was scratched – badly scratched – not bruised from a fall. If you like, I’ll strip off now and you can examine my whole body.’

I shook my head. I had known Henry for some time, but I felt I didn’t know him quite well enough for what he was proposing. I got him to take off his jacket and roll up his shirtsleeves instead. There were one or two minor abrasions on his hands and wrists, consistent with picking blackberries or playing with a fairly small, considerate kitten.

‘If you’re drunk it’s easy enough to get scratched – maybe you went too close to some rose bushes …’

‘All right, but how do you explain this? When I went out and looked at my car it was covered in mud. It was as if I’d been driving through the jungles of Malaya.’

‘Malaysia,’ I said. ‘For the past fifty years it’s been called Malaysia.’

‘Has it? Well, I’d clearly been somewhere where they could spare a few buckets of mud for my car and never miss it.’

‘I don’t know how much this helps, but I doubt that it was Malaysia. It’s a long way away. And you don’t recall—’

‘No. I don’t recall a thing. To save time, Ethelred – because otherwise my hunch is that you’ll return to this
over and over again – let me state categorically that I do not remember anything after the country pub and not much after Chichester.’

For a moment I contemplated the walls of my new study, wondering whether I had been wise to paint them Book Room Red. I think I had been attracted by the literary associations of the name rather than by the precise shade of the pigment. In the bleak half-light of a winter afternoon, the walls looked the colour of dried blood. Of course, dried blood is part of my stock-in-trade, but you can have too much of a good thing.

Henry too was eyeing the walls with a critical air. I had him down as the sort of man who would paint his study Savage Ground or possibly even Clunch. He had a theory that the stranger the name, the better the paint. Clunch it was then.

But I was suddenly aware how little I really knew him – not just his preference for paint, but almost anything. We were, as I say, both crime writers and had met from time to time at conferences and book launches. We had compared sales figures at Crime Writers’ Association parties. We had compared agents in the bar of the Swan Hotel at Harrogate and not to my advantage. When I had moved to this side of the county and bought a house in West Wittering, I noticed from the CWA Directory that he lived just a few miles down the road. I’d invited him round to dinner. It was a perfectly pleasant evening, but once we’d explored the coincidence of our being settled in this corner of Sussex we had found we had remarkably little in common. When he said that I must come and have dinner with him, we both mentally noted that it
need not be in the immediate future. Then, suddenly, he had arrived on my doorstep, in the very depth of winter, to tell me that he had murdered somebody. It was much too kind of him.

‘If you are really worried,’ I said, ‘why not go to the police? They handle this sort of thing all the time. I bet they’d be quite good at it.’

‘I want to find out what happened, Ethelred. But I don’t necessarily want to spend thirty years in Her Majesty’s Prison on Dartmoor. When I realised that I might have murdered somebody, my first thought wasn’t: “Why don’t I go and grass myself up?” Anyway, you clearly don’t believe me, so why should the police? I’m only guessing, but I think their jokes will be even worse than yours.’

‘Hold on!’ I said. ‘When you started your account, you said “we”. You were clearly with somebody else. All you need to do is phone them now and
ask
, for goodness’ sake. Who was your drinking companion? Or don’t you remember that either?’

‘Crispin Vynall,’ said Henry.

‘Ah,’ I said.

Vynall was no friend of mine, and Henry knew it. I don’t mean that we had fallen out, but I had never liked his gory, hard-boiled thrillers, with their multiple gang rapes and eye-gougings – and he had pointedly ignored my traditional police procedurals in his monthly round-up of crime fiction for whichever of the Sunday papers he then reviewed for. The only occasion on which he had mentioned me was when he compared the ‘fluent, sparkling prose’ of some new young author with the ‘predictable plots of an
older generation of writers such as Peter Fielding’. Peter Fielding is one of the three names that I write under. I’d have missed it, but my agent was thoughtful enough to send me the press cutting. She’d underlined ‘predictable’.

Henry also wrote hard-boiled thrillers that were very much in Crispin’s style. I often told Henry how much I enjoyed them but that was a lie. I’d read two. They were facile, fast-paced stories with an abrupt twist inserted as a matter of course at the end of every chapter. The need to switch direction every thirty pages or so mean they were full of unnecessary complexity and multiple coincidences. The main characters could look forward to being tied up or tortured every third chapter on average. The stories kept your attention of course, but the endings were somehow contrived and improbable. They left you feeling duped and slightly stupid. It was as if Henry expected people to read them so quickly that they would not notice the gaps and inconsistencies. Perhaps that was what most people did. His sales were undeniably better than mine. There are clearly a lot of readers out there who like detailed descriptions of hideously violent acts. It’s not the sort of book I write myself. But Henry and Crispin both wrote them and they both earned a lot more than I did.

‘I tried phoning Crispin,’ said Henry in response to my question. ‘No reply.’

‘Try again now,’ I said.

He took out his mobile, glanced at it and declared the battery dead.

‘Use mine,’ I said.

He took my handset from me and dialled a number.
I heard a buzzing from my phone as, somewhere, Vynall’s mobile played whatever catchy little tune it was programmed to play. After a while a recorded message cut in. Even without the accompaniment of Vynall’s sarcastic grin, the voice grated – a former public schoolboy trying to do Estuary English. But the message was clear. Crispin Vynall was not available to take my or anyone else’s call right now. He was writing some cool stuff or chilling with his mates. He’d get back to me if I left a number. Henry left a brief message asking for his call to be returned at Crispin’s earliest convenience.

‘He’s obviously gone out and left his mobile at home. People do that,’ I said.

‘No,
you
do that, Ethelred. Normal people, by and large, take their mobile phones with them. They’re mobile. That’s why they call them mobile phones. People like you – people who start like a frightened rabbit every time it rings – do quite possibly leave their phone behind. You’d know better than I do.’

‘Well, you’ll get him eventually.’

‘If he’s still alive.’

‘Still alive? You’re not saying you think you might have killed
Crispin
?’ I didn’t like Crispin, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to wish him dead.

‘Don’t you think that’s possible? I start the evening drinking with him. Then, at some point, he just vanishes from the scene. Now he’s uncontactable. Anything could have happened.’

‘Or, more likely, nothing happened at all,’ I said.

Henry shook his head. ‘You’ve seen me drunk a few times, haven’t you?’

I considered. ‘Not really. Not compared with most crime writers I know.’

Henry frowned. A hard-boiled crime writer needed to be, as a matter of course, a hard drinker too. ‘I’d have said I could put it away with the best of them.’

Fine, if that was what he wanted. ‘OK, then – you’ve been drunk on half of the occasions I’ve met you. Is that better?’

Henry nodded as if that fitted in with the most recent research, though it clearly still irked him that I didn’t have him down as an out-and-out lush. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘But think, Ethelred: however much I put away the previous evening, have I ever told you that I had
no recollection
of what I had done?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve never told me that.’

This time, at least, I’d got the right answer at the first attempt. ‘Absolutely,’ said Henry. ‘And
that’s
why I need your help, Ethelred.’

I sighed. ‘Run it all past me again,’ I said. ‘Leave out no detail, however trivial. Then I’ll give Crispin another call so that he can tell us if he’s alive or not.’

Henry scowled at me, but I was not to be browbeaten into condemning him as a murderer. He’d need to make the story pretty good.