The Herring Seller's Apprentice (5 page)

The probability that Geraldine was alive and had successfully left the neighbourhood with a considerable amount of other people’s money was becoming so strong that the next call came as something of a change of pace.

‘Good evening, sir. It’s Detective Inspector Cooke here. I’m sorry to phone you so late, but we’ve found a body. We think that you may be able to identify it for us.’

Perhaps at no time other than our own could a man reach comfortable middle age without confronting a dead body in the cold flesh.

I had of course seen my share of corpses: Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, South Africa, Bosnia had nightly provided a procession of bodies, mutilated and unmutilated according to the taste of the winning side, on my television screen. But not a real live dead corpse. Everything now conspires to separate the living and the dead.

When my father died, I was away at university. We Tressiders were not the sort of family to leave bodies carelessly strewn around the house. By the time I returned home my father was safely boxed up and ready for disposal in the normal, seemly manner.

When my mother died some years later, happy and prematurely senile in a hospital in Poole, there was some delay in contacting me and I arrived to find that she had been removed to the mortuary. A plump, unctuous young man with a smooth pink face asked me whether I wished to see my mother’s body. I must have paused for a moment, because he quickly added, ‘Many people prefer not to. It can be distressing. Very distressing.’ His gaze was directed at the floor rather than at me, but since the floor seemed unlikely to feel distressed, I replied on its behalf.

‘Most people prefer not to?’

‘Not under the circumstances.’

I wondered what he meant. Then I remembered that my mother had, years before, agreed to donate various parts of her body for transplantation or research, as the doctors in their wisdom saw fit. Perhaps he meant that very little that was recognizable remained. Would it be in bad taste to ask which bits they had taken? Heart? Lungs? Kidneys? Eyes? Assorted offal?

‘Whatever you think best,’ I said awkwardly.

‘I think you are very wise,’ he said, softly congratulating the floor.

Later it occurred to me, rather uncharitably, that at my mother’s advanced age she would have had little that even the most desperate transplantee would have coveted. Perhaps it was nothing more than that the modern etiquette is simply not to view a dead body. Or the young man may have just been reluctant to take me on the long walk down to the mortuary at the end of a hard day. But that equally uncharitable thought came much later.

‘There are some papers that we need you to sign,’ he said.

I took a much shorter walk to an untidy office and signed them, thus missing my second chance to view a corpse.

Now, in middle age, I had been offered another appointment with death, and this time I was not sure that I wanted it. There was, however, little possibility of escape. I was led inexorably along a corridor and into a room full of white tiles and gleaming stainless steel. In the middle of the room was a table and on the table was a shrouded form, with a provisional claim to being my late ex-wife.

Perhaps it was the lifelong build-up to this moment, but the instant when the sheet was finally pulled back to reveal a head and shoulders was strangely one of relief.

The face that I saw, in a way so familiar but in a way so unfamiliar, was that of a woman in early middle age with short blonde hair. What mischief there had been in the smile in life had been replaced by a singular serenity. Sergeant Fairfax, looking over my shoulder, drew my attention to the fact that the hair had been recently dyed – the colouring was unnaturally even, but there was no trace of dark roots showing. The hair also seemed to have been cut only a few days before. Make-up had been carefully applied – eye shadow, bright red lipstick. The red jacket, the top of which was showing above the stiff green sheet, looked new in spite of some muddy stains. If this was suicide, then she had wanted to be a smart corpse.

‘We immediately assumed that it was your wife,’ said the young policeman who had accompanied me there. ‘But we do need you to confirm the identification.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘So, you are able to identify the body, sir?’

Just for a moment – but only for a moment – I was tempted to say, ‘Officer, I have never seen this woman before in my life,’ if only to see the look of consternation that I knew it would cause. But I am not the sort of person who plays cheap tricks. That was always Geraldine’s forte.

‘I understand that it’s been some time …’ he began, apparently as much to fill in time as anything. In this place there seemed to be a great deal of time to fill.

‘I would know my wife anywhere, officer,’ I said quickly and firmly.

‘You’ve no doubt about that?’

‘None at all.’

The young constable breathed a sigh of relief. ‘We are very grateful to you for identifying the body, sir. I realize that you and she have been divorced for some time. We might have asked her sister, but she does live some way away and it would have been …’

‘Very distressing for her?’

‘Exactly, sir. Very distressing.’

‘That was thoughtful of you. Where was the body found?’

‘Up on Cissbury Ring.’

‘Cissbury?’

‘That’s quite close to you, isn’t it, sir?’

‘Fifteen minutes’ walk – maybe twenty.’

He looked at me a little oddly. I saw his point. The action was getting closer and closer to home.

‘She was found late this afternoon. A man walking his dog,’ the policeman added. Now that he had a firm identification, the real work of the evening seemed to be over and he was becoming quite chatty. ‘She was hidden amongst gorse bushes in one of the old flint pits.
Strangled.
’ He laid particular emphasis upon this last word.

Fairfax tutted that I had not spotted the slight bruising round the throat.

‘Strangled,’ I repeated. ‘And …’

‘No, just strangled really. Your wife’s body was found fully clothed – quite expensively clothed, to the extent that I am able to judge, Italian anyway. But no handbag, purse, wallet, driving licence, jewellery. Just the one shoe so far – high-heeled, also Italian, also red. In view of the missing items, for the moment we have to assume robbery was the motive.’

Or perhaps somebody wanted to remove the things that would identify her, I thought.

‘The murderer took everything then?’ I asked.

‘We did find one thing nearby, though it’s not clear whether it belonged to your wife,’ said the policeman. ‘A rather soggy paperback called
Professional Misconduct –
a romantic novel by—’

‘Amanda Collins,’ I said.

‘Well, fancy your knowing that,’ he said, much impressed.

‘You will find that its hero, Mr Colin Cream, is eventually exonerated by the GDC and marries the loyal and faithful dental nurse. I only know because I wrote it. Amanda Collins is just a pen-name.’ I smiled modestly.

This however did not impress him. My actually being Amanda Collins clearly devalued, in his eyes, my earlier achievement of knowing who wrote
Professional Misconduct.
Fortunately I have long since learned to manage without praise and admiration.

‘Your wife enjoyed romantic fiction, did she, sir?’

‘Enjoyed? No,’ I said. ‘Not as far as I know.’

We both turned again to look at the body – a few moments ago a nameless thing found by a dog, now Geraldine Tressider. A real person again with a unique identity, a bank account, a national insurance number, an ex-husband. (She currently had no credit cards, passport or driving licence, but she probably wouldn’t be needing them.) I wanted to stroke the forehead, to smooth away the pain as one does, I would imagine, with a sick child. But of course, I didn’t do any such thing. We Tressiders don’t.

‘How long had she been there?’ I asked.

‘We still have to wait for the pathologist’s report, but we think just a couple of nights – which fits with when her car was left at West Wittering.’

Or to put it another way, when I was in France. ‘Excellent,’ I said.

‘Excellent?’

‘I mean, I assume that is all for the moment?’

‘Just one or two more questions, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘But not here.’ He nodded in the direction of the body. I doubted that she would either hear or interrupt, but he was still calling me ‘sir’ and I reckoned that the questions would not be too difficult to handle. Accordingly I allowed myself to be led out of the gleaming room and back along the corridor to the world of the living.

‘A man walking his dog’ – the phrase kept recurring to me in the taxi back to Greypoint House. It always brings a very clear picture to my mind. The man is dressed in a tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers and heavy brown brogues. He has a small, carefully trimmed moustache and quite possibly a peaked cap. The dog is quite large – an English setter or a pointer. It capers around, tail wagging, ears flopping stupidly, then dives into some bushes. Suddenly there is frantic barking. The man frowns and calls the dog. ‘Jess! Come here!’ There is no response. ‘Jess, come!’

He turns and starts to stride purposefully towards the bushes, little suspecting what is to follow.

To be quite honest, I too, at that point, had little idea of what would happen next.

My father spent his life perfecting failure.

I imagine that, in his youth, his ambition must have been a chair in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford or Cambridge. By the time I was old enough to be aware of him as a possessor of ambitions, he had considerably lowered his sights to a lecturership at one of the new universities that were then springing up. He faced the problem however that, even for one of these quite plentiful appointments, he would require published work. But, at the same time, no reputable journal was likely to publish his papers unless he had a university post or some other evidence of academic credibility. While he was trying to see a way round this little difficulty, he taught English at a local state secondary school.

There he blighted many A-level prospects by insisting that all of his pupils received a thorough grounding in
Beowulf
before he was prepared to introduce them to other texts that merely happened to be part of the curriculum. It is perhaps surprising how long the school was willing to tolerate this eccentricity. It took four or five years before he was relegated to teaching the lower forms, where it was felt he could not inflict any significant damage on young minds. Nevertheless, several generations of bemused first and second formers still had to endure
Widsith, Deor, The Ruin, The Wanderer
and
The Battle of Maldon
as their introduction to secondary school English.

I can still see him quite clearly (because for one excruciating term I was in a class that he taught), his tall frame perched precariously on the edge of his desk, his glasses balanced equally precariously on the end of his nose, his book held stiffly in front of him, declaiming verse.

It was from these particular lines that my father eventually acquired the nickname ‘Glom’, which, all things considered, was one of the most positive developments to come from his poetry readings. The name rather suited him and, had the boys really disliked him, they were capable of coming up with nicknames that were very much worse than that.

Sometimes, in desperation, he would try one or two of the Saxon riddles, hoping that their clumsy double entendres would appeal to our adolescent sense of humour.

‘“Swings near his thigh a miraculous object! It hangs below the belt, midst the folds of his garments, stiff and hard, with a hole in its front.”
Well, what do you think that can be, Thompson? Eh?’

His mild blue eyes would scan the class, desperately pleading with each of us to share the joke. But while the class would often laugh uncontrollably during tragic epics or love poems, my father’s attempts at humour would invariably stun them into horrified and embarrassed silence.

Being in his class for English was, however, infinitely preferable to being taken by my father for games. The news that their football match was to be refereed by him was always greeted by the teams concerned with loud groans and pitying looks in my direction. My father’s attitude to football was simply this: that it was a singularly unimportant activity and that it therefore mattered little whether he followed the strict rules of the sport in question. I believe that he did in fact have a better grasp of the laws of the game than any of us (he certainly had a number of books on the subject at home) but he seemed to delight in awarding free kicks or disallowing penalties in the most cavalier and arbitrary manner. His refusal to see that, for us at least, each game mattered enormously, was the closest my father ever came to deliberate cruelty. But time spent on a muddy sports field was, for him, time utterly wasted and he would have scorned to pretend otherwise.

He used to say to me that if he could only teach just one child to love the beauty of Anglo-Saxon poetry, then his life would not have been entirely in vain. It is doubtful however whether even this relatively modest ambition was achieved. When I went to university I elected to read geography, even though I preferred both history and English, on the grounds that geography was a subject wholly untainted by any contact with Angles, Saxons, Jutes or Gloms.

But by that time my father had discovered that whisky could be an excellent substitute for ambition, or indeed life. I don’t believe that he ever registered either my treachery or even the fact that I had left home.

Later, after I became known for my detective novels, people would ask me whether I had based the pessimistic and introspective Inspector Fairfax on anyone I knew. I have always replied ‘no’. Though my father had good cause to take a dim view of life, he remained in fact an incurable optimist, right up to the day that he committed suicide.

‘You’d have thought that a decent pub would have at least stocked Cadbury’s.’ Elsie deposited onto the wet table a pint of beer for me and a lemonade for herself. Alcohol was not her vice. Chocolate was.