Crooked Herring (15 page)

‘I’m sorry if I have not told you the entire truth,’ said Henry. ‘But it was necessary.’

‘Necessary?’ I said.

‘Just give me a chance to explain.’

‘I don’t see what justification you can possibly offer,’ I said. ‘You did kill Crispin Vynall, and you knew that all along. The whole memory loss thing was a complete fabrication.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry.

‘I just don’t understand why you would want to kill Crispin. Still less why you would want to involve me.’

‘Yes, you do. Think back, Ethelred. When did you first hear about me?’

‘When? I don’t know. Sometime after your first book was published. Possibly I read a review. Or maybe I saw you on a debut authors panel at Harrogate or somewhere.’

‘No, further back than that.’

‘I don’t know then … were you in publishing or something? Did we meet at somebody’s book launch?’

‘Publishing? I worked as a waiter while I wrote my first novel. It took seven years – seven years during which I starved for my craft.’

‘Starved? In a restaurant? Surely not?’

‘I speak metaphorically. Of course, they fed us. I mean the long days spent hunched over a keyboard, deprived of sunlight or the sight of flowers or the sound of children laughing …’

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

‘… or love or affection or money or friends or the sort of simple pleasures other people take for granted …’

‘But that’s what being a writer is like,’ I said.

‘Yes, and it’s worth it when your book is finally published.’

‘But yours was.’

‘Not the first one. Not the one that I entered for the CWA new writers’ competition.’

‘That was the great literary detective novel that you subsequently destroyed?’

‘Precisely.’

‘You killed Crispin because he awarded the prize to Mary Devlin Jones.’

‘He wrecked my career. You all did. You and he and Janet Francis. Crispin’s role was at least an active one – he actually read that first manuscript. Much later he joked that he thought that it was simply too good – he’d been jealous of my talent. That’s why it was never shortlisted. In fact, he’d simply promised Mary Devlin Jones that she’d
win the competition and he was carefully knocking out anything that might stand in her way. His motive may have been wholly dishonourable, but
he had a reason
. But you and Janet couldn’t even be bothered to read it …’

‘Crispin told me I didn’t need to,’ I said.

‘So you didn’t.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Of course not. Crispin said not to.’ Not even Elsie, at her most sarcastic, could have got the childish whine into that last sentence. Crispin said
not to
. The note of petulance was real. The wound was still raw. ‘You were a pathetic, feeble excuse for a judge of a literary award, just as you are still a pathetic, feeble excuse for a writer. Weren’t you even curious to see the thing I’d spent seven years working on? You didn’t want to just take a peep at it? Just in case your views were a tiny bit different from Crispin’s?’

‘I was busy … there were so many manuscripts to read …’

‘Don’t you think that those of us who had submitted our life-work had also been busy? Don’t you think we deserved better?’

‘I apologise. Does that help?’

‘No.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

I waited to see what Henry would say next.

‘It was a bit like that Count of Monte Cristo, really. The black deeds of my enemies had been exposed – yours, Crispin’s, Janet’s and of course those of Mary Devlin Jones.’

‘But Mary was completely innocent,’ I said.

‘Only legally and morally,’ Henry sneered. ‘Do you know what total despair feels like, Ethelred? The feeling of utter worthlessness with no hope of anything better? Your soul ripped from your body and tossed aside as worthless dross? Grief such as nobody has ever felt before or will ever feel again?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Actually, most days are a bit like that.’

‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Not like the grief I felt then. Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I’d underestimated you as a writer. Is that from one of your books?’

‘It’s Alexandre Dumas,’ he snapped. ‘But he might have penned it for me personally. Crispin wrote to me after the competition. He said that the three of you had read the book and thought it was rubbish. Oh, he presented it as helpful criticism, but that was the general drift. I destroyed the manuscript. I wiped the computer disc clean. I deleted earlier drafts. I tore out the notes I had written on the plot and dumped them in the recycling bin.’

‘And then you decided to take your revenge?’

‘No. Of course not. I’d assumed your criticism was justified. I admired Crispin as a best-selling author. Janet’s reputation as an agent was then at its peak. I even had some sort of regard for you. How could you all be wrong? At first I resolved to write nothing ever again. Then I thought – well, if Crispin sells so many books, why don’t I just try to write like him? How hard can that be? And it worked. I sold my second novel to my current publisher and I’ve never looked back.’

‘Except you did look back. You couldn’t forget what Crispin … what we … had done.’

‘It was much later, when I saw Crispin together with Mary Devlin Jones, that alarm bells started to ring. I asked around. Some people had raised their eyebrows when he had awarded the prize to her, but the feeling was that you at least were decent and honourable and that you wouldn’t have allowed the award to go to her unless you felt that she deserved it. Hah!’

I’m not sure I had ever heard anyone say ‘hah!’ in quite that way before. There was a depth to his bitterness that was quite remarkable. It was like looking into a well whose sides drop away forever into a dark, ice-cold void.

‘Once I realised how I had been cheated, I tried to resurrect the lost novel. I could still remember the plot. I found a list of characters that I had jotted down and forgotten about. I set about rewriting it. I’m pretty sure that I got the action in the first chapter exactly as it had been – but the magic had gone. I pressed on chapter after chapter, but when I reread it, it merely sounded smug and pretentious.’

Henry put his hands to his head as if recalling the anguish anew. One thing that I was not ruling out, because I knew Henry’s work reasonably well, was that the original had been smug and pretentious too. Pretentiousness in other writers is always immediately apparent. It takes time and patience to spot it in your own work. Very often you see it when you return to an old draft after a long break.

‘But you were a success …’ I pointed out.

‘By your standards, perhaps … I was making money, but I was writing books that I despised. I thought that I
could write crime novels that would be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.’

‘It doesn’t happen,’ I said. ‘It will never happen.’

‘
I
could have done it,’ he said.

‘I’ve always wanted to write a literary novel myself,’ I added.

‘Yes, Ethelred. The difference is that I was actually capable of doing so. I’ve read your stuff, remember? And I’ve talked to your agent. She’s under no illusions – trust me on that.’

Was there any point in saying that I had thought, in all of my novels, that my literary ambitions were there for all to see? Probably not. I was in any case more and more convinced that, in spite of the reviews he had written, Henry had read none of my books.

‘Mary Devlin Jones was the easiest,’ Henry continued. ‘She had blatantly imitated Crispin’s style. Once I knew the two of them were an item, it wasn’t difficult to start a rumour that the book was really Crispin’s. An insinuation here, a word slipped in there. Mary’s rise had been meteoric in its way. Her sales had been excellent. Justifiable praise had been showered on her. She had received the adulation graciously and modestly. People were delighted to discover that she was in fact a talentless hack. As for Crispin, my immediate reaction, when his duplicity became absolutely clear, was quite simply that he deserved to die. Of course, it’s much easier to say that than to do it. It took a while to go a stage further and reason that, as a crime writer, I ought to be able to bump him off and get away with it. It’s all a matter of Motive, Opportunity and Means, isn’t it? I had the Motive, so I worked on Opportunity. I got
to know him better. I hung around in the bar with him. I got him to
trust
me. I had no specific plan in mind – just that when the chance arose, I would take it. One of the best methods, as you know, is simply to push somebody off a cliff. People fall to their deaths pretty much every week. All I’d have to say was that we were both out for a walk together and that he went too close to the edge and slipped. I tried to save him but unfortunately … a terrible scream then a sickening thud on the rocks below. It’s just a matter of choosing a time and place where there are no witnesses – a lonely coastal footpath in Pembrokeshire in January, say, if you can persuade the victim to take a bargain city-break in Haverfordwest. Food poisoning too is good – especially if I had been prepared to give myself a non-lethal dose of the same thing to allay suspicion. So, I extended the hand of friendship, you might say and waited for my chance.

‘It came quite unexpectedly and not in a way that I would have predicted. Crispin and Emma were not getting on well, for reasons that will have been clear to you. I had said to Crispin that if things ever became too unpleasant at home, he could come and stay with me. Why, you ask, would he choose me rather than anyone else? Because turning up on somebody’s doorstep with a suitcase and a broken marriage and then requesting to stay for an indefinite period is a test of any friendship, however long-standing. I knew he would have few choices other than me.’

I nodded. After my split with Geraldine, I’d found much the same thing. I was offered much sympathy but few beds for the night. And nobody suggested that I should move in permanently.

‘Having him in my own house seemed to offer up all sorts of possibilities,’ Henry continued. ‘A badly wired plug, fumes from a faulty boiler, a tripwire on the stairs. But for a while relations between him and Emma seemed to improve. So I decided to speed things up a little.’

‘You contacted Emma and told her Crispin was sleeping with her best friend?’

‘Exactly. It seemed likely to move things on. To cut a long story short, Crispin phoned me and I collected him in my car, Emma having driven off in theirs. He was not a troublesome guest. He had a book to finish and worked most of the time. His contact with the outside world was limited to the odd call to his agent. He welcomed the seclusion my house offered. But I suggested that we let our hair down a bit on New Year’s Eve and hit some of the local nightspots. It was only when we were in the car, with Crispin very drunk, that it struck me that I could probably strangle him there and then without his really noticing. Of course, I’d have a corpse to dispose of, which is awkward, but then an idea occurred to me, because sometimes being very drunk seems to strip out all of the extraneous stuff and allows you to concentrate on the one thing that really matters. I was no longer Henry Holiday. I was Edmond Dantès, I had the Baron Danglars in my passenger seat and he was snoring his head off.

‘When we reached Didling Green, I drove straight up the hill – I know the area well – and parked at the top. Crispin was still fast asleep, head back, mouth wide open. I had some rope in the boot. I crept out, got it and had it looped twice round his neck before he knew what was
happening. As he breathed his last I whispered in his ear the title of that lost book. I think he understood, but, on balance, I don’t give much of a shit one way or the other. Once he was dead, I dragged the body into the woods and concealed it in a mass of brambles. It would be found, of course, but probably not for a few days and by then I would be safe. I drove back down to the pub where the New Year festivities were still in full swing and ordered myself a double whisky.’

‘Where your photograph was taken.’

‘Yes. It was a stupid thing for me to have done. But my hands were still shaking. I needed that drink. I honestly thought that a pub on New Year’s Eve would be one place that I could slip into and out of without anyone remembering me. The flash from the camera startled me, but I still reckoned that I was enough in the background that nobody would notice me. People take so many pictures these days and then scarcely look at them, let alone print them out. Things were so much better in the fifties, weren’t they?’

‘Much. Colin Cowdrey and Peter May opening the batting for England.’

‘Trueman and Statham bowling the Australians out for a handful of runs. Happy days.’

‘Happy days, indeed. Then you drove home?’

‘Very carefully. Very carefully indeed. I didn’t want to kill anyone, after all.’

‘And you then came round to me and asked me to investigate the murder you had committed?’

‘Precisely.’

‘I don’t understand why.’

‘You will.’

‘Shall I? OK. So, you killed Crispin and destroyed Mary’s career. You imply you have some revenge planned for me. What about Janet Francis? Or have you forgiven her?’

‘Forgiven? Certainly not. Her turn will come. I got her to agree to take on a young niece of mine as an unneeded work-experience assistant. I don’t yet know all of the little secrets the agency is hiding but I know some. In fact I’ve already discovered one very large secret the press would love to know. That will become public before too long. The agency may limp on afterwards with the handful of clients it has left, but Janet will be finished as a force in publishing.’

‘Well, I can prevent that at least,’ I said.

Henry smiled and shook his head. ‘As I say, I already have a great deal of information. In any case, I think you’ll find that in the next few weeks that isn’t your main priority. It’s not as though Janet Francis is anything to you.’

We stood there for a moment, sizing each other up. About five foot four in Henry’s case. Unless he was carrying a gun, I didn’t rate his chances of stopping me before I got to the phone.