7,19 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: The Herring Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
Ethelred Tressider, mid-list crime writer, is surprised when fellow author Henry Holiday unexpectedly turns up on his doorstep. He's even more surprised when Henry confesses that he may have committed murder while drunk on New Year's Eve. Though he has little recollection of the night, Henry fears he may have killed drinking companion and fellow crime writer Crispin Vynall, and asks Ethelred to discreetly make enquiries in order to discover the truth.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 349
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Ähnliche
Crooked Herring
L. C. TYLER
To my wife Ann, who for thirty years has successfully resisted murdering me.
‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself’
Raymond Chandler
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
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.
CHAPTER ONE
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.
And this was the complete story as he told it. He and Crispin Vynall had gone out for a drink on New Year’s Eve. They had started at my own local pub – no great coincidence since Henry, as I have said, lived close by, while Crispin lived somewhere over by Brighton. They had decided that the village of West Wittering was a little too quiet and, at Crispin’s suggestion, had headed into the great metropolis of Chichester, about fifteen minutes’ drive away at legal speeds – ten at the sort of speed Henry would have driven in his vintage Jaguar. They had followed some back roads on the outskirts of town. Henry said he didn’t know precisely where they had ended up but, listening to him, I had a fairly good idea about which place they had visited.
I remembered seeing the New Year School Disco advertised in the local papers for some weeks beforehand. There aren’t in fact that many nightclubs in Chichester. Pubs, yes. Tea rooms, certainly. Garden centres with cafes selling lemon drizzle cake, no problem. Cavernous spaces throbbing with a pulsating beat – not so much. The establishment in question was, as Henry had implied, a club frequented mainly by students and young professionals intent on having a good time. I wasn’t a regular there myself, you might say – I usually preferred Russell’s Garden Centre – but I was pretty sure I knew where they’d been.
Henry continued that he had found it hot and the music deafening. He had suggested leaving, but Crispin had said he liked the company of young people, by which he seemed to mean young female people. So, Henry had sat a great deal of the time in a corner drinking beer, while Crispin cruised the dance floor, occasionally draping himself around a girl thirty years his junior with an ease that Henry had envied. I nodded sympathetically.
It all fitted in with my recollection of Crispin in the bars of conference hotels. Nobody could deny that he knew how to have a good time if his wife wasn’t watching him too closely. There was agreement, at least amongst crime writers, that Crispin resembled an aging rock star, though there was a lack of consensus over which one. One of the Rolling Stones perhaps, or Rod Stewart, or maybe even Howard Marks, if you wanted to widen the circle to friendly, retired drug dealers. He undoubtedly had the sagging face, the leather jacket, the long, unnaturally black hair and a lopsided grin that hung halfway between easy amiability and unabashed lechery. There was no questioning that he would have been more at home at the club than Henry or I.
Sometime after eleven, Henry continued, Crispin had proposed going on by taxi to another place he knew, where the girls were possibly younger still and the music louder. Henry had politely declined and watched Crispin leave on his own. Then there was a complete blank except for two things. First he remembered the chimes of Big Ben sounding and he had noticed he was in a crowded, low-ceilinged room with copious beams and much brass on the walls. He took this to be a country pub and something more to his liking. Later – or perhaps a little before – he was outdoors, apparently in a wood. It was raining gently and water was dripping from the branches above his head. He could see the spire of the church and, dark against the clouds, its weathervane representing a ship in full sail. He had felt tired. He felt in need of a very strong drink, suggesting perhaps that the pub bit came later rather than earlier. Then he was in his own bed. It was still dark, his bedside clock read 03.54 and a nameless dread was creeping over him. He went back to sleep until mid-morning, when he woke again, got up and made some coffee. Then he phoned Crispin Vynall. There was no reply.
‘The church,’ I said. ‘The first time round, you didn’t mention the church.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘Maybe your memory of the evening is returning?’ I suggested. ‘Is there any more that you can recall?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. But this time he didn’t reprimand me for repeating my question.
‘How did you get to the church?’
‘I must have driven, don’t you think? Hence the mud on the car.’
‘You shouldn’t have been driving in that state.’
‘Ethelred, I’m saying that I may have murdered somebody. The drink-drive charges are relatively insignificant.’
‘But what if what you half-recall is running somebody over?’
‘There was no damage to the car – just mud.’
‘Very well. You drove back safely in your muddy car. I’m surprised the police didn’t stop you, but you would have been just one of many drunks on the road that night. They can’t stop everyone. It’s an interesting story. I don’t see how I can help you, though. I’d love to, but I can’t.’
We both knew there was at least one lie in that last sentence.
‘I want you to find out what happened,’ said Henry. ‘To investigate. I need to know where I went and I need to know that Crispin is all right.’
‘And there is some good reason why it should be me rather than you who goes poking around West Sussex in the middle of winter?’
‘I could do it but … and I admit this … I’m frightened about what I may discover. Let me be entirely frank and say I’m not sure I have the guts to go through with it. And you are a better writer than I am – or at least your skills are more appropriate. I write thrillers. If we were both chained in a cellar with the water rising rapidly and rats crawling over our hair, then I’d know what our options were. But you, as you say, write dull and painstakingly accurate police procedurals. You know about gathering evidence and making logical deductions.’
‘Most of the things that the police have access to – CCTV footage, fingerprinting, trained pathologists and DNA evidence to name but four – are completely unavailable to me. Nor can I walk into whichever pub you were in, flash a warrant card and demand that people answer my questions.’
‘I explained why I can’t go to the police,’ he said patiently. ‘Even if I planned to turn myself in, I’d at least like to know first who I murdered and why. Maybe you will draw a complete blank, in which case I’ll have to accept your hypothesis that it was all some sort of dream. But I’d still like you to try.’
Philip Marlowe would have narrowed his eyes and growled: ‘OK, but it’s going to cost you plenty. I hope you’ve got a rich uncle.’ I just said the first two of those words. And the emphasis was on ‘but’. My objections were:
1) I wasn’t a real detective, just a crime writer who wrote about detectives. Even that wasn’t terribly profitable.
2) To the extent that I had tried my hand at being a real detective, it had usually resulted in terror, discomfort and real humiliation. For me. Not for the criminal.
3) My investigations had led to my being arrested three times and released three times. There was a sense in which I could still quit while I was ahead.
4) If Henry had killed Crispin Vynall I was beginning to realise that I honestly didn’t care that much. Of course, I cared in a theoretical way, but that underlined word ‘predictable’ still grated, even now.
I obviously hadn’t explained it quite that well to Henry, however, because he was looking at me as though we’d just become blood brothers.
‘So, you’ll do it?’ he asked.
‘It would be pointless,’ I said. ‘I’m not a detective and I have a deadline looming.’
‘I thought so,’ he said smugly.
‘Thought what?’
‘You’ve never really done any research into how crimes are solved, other than read Agatha Christie and Colin Dexter. You lack even the most superficial knowledge of police work. It’s exactly what your Amazon reviews say, by the way.’
Fans of Christie and Dexter might have raised their eyebrows at this. Elsie, as my agent, would have simply nodded and said that was the problem she has always had with my work. But I wasn’t in the mood for constructive feedback.
‘I’ve already explained—’
‘I don’t want a DNA analysis or a report on maggots found at the scene of the crime – just that you ask a few questions and find out what happened on New Year’s Eve. How difficult can that be?’
‘Not difficult at all. You could do it yourself. In any case, with the greatest of respect, we’ve hardly seen each other for months then you suddenly turn up and expect me to drop everything and be a detective.’
‘I actually phoned you on New Year’s Eve.’
‘You sent me a text saying you were out having a good time. I sent you one in return saying I was watching television on my own.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. I did. I wasn’t looking for an invitation to join you, but at the same time I certainly didn’t get one. It’s a bit late to invite me to join the party now. I am politely declining your offer. You do it.’
‘Apart from all of the reasons I’ve already given, Ethelred, I simply don’t have the time. The Telegraph and the SundayTimes have both asked me to write a monthly round-up of crime fiction for them. It will be a lot of work but it will give me the chance to support mid-list authors who deserve to be known better. Authors who don’t normally get reviewed in the national press. Authors who are unfairly rubbished on Amazon. Authors whose sales deserve the real boost that a glowing review from a well-respected crime writer can offer.’
He looked at me significantly.
‘What did you mean about being rubbished on Amazon?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying I’ve had some bad reviews there?’
‘Don’t you check them?’
‘Not often.’
‘Maybe you should. Of course, the only important reviews are still the ones you get in the press. The quality press. The sort of papers I write for. When is your next book out, by the way?’
I paused. He might be bluffing, but could I risk it?
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said, ‘but I’ll just try to establish where you and Crispin were on New Year’s Eve – after that you’re on your own.’
‘That’s very good of you.’
‘If you remember anything else let me know,’ I said.
‘I’ll try,’ he said meekly.
‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. In the meantime, don’t worry about it too much. I can’t imagine you’ve done anything untoward – let alone committed murder. I’m sure it will all be fine.’
I was aware I sounded a little bit like the presenter of Crimewatch, who (for the record) never reassured me in the slightest that serious crime was a rare occurrence. Henry, on the other hand, seemed satisfied.
‘Thanks, Ethelred,’ he said, and he shook my hand.
‘Just out of interest,’ I said, ‘what are my options if I’m chained up in a cellar with the water rising rapidly?’
‘Don’t worry. The girl you met in chapter three should have worked out where you are and is already on her way with chain cutters,’ said Henry.
‘And if she hasn’t?’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Henry.
Later I briefly contemplated phoning Elsie to ask her advice. Had I done so, things might have been very different. On the other hand, judging by Elsie’s subsequent conduct, things might equally have been exactly the same. Or worse. We’ll never know really. Not now.
CHAPTER TWO
Amazon.co.uk
Death in the Cathedral Close (A Buckfordshire mystery) [paperback] Peter Fielding (author)
Customer reviews
***** A great traditional mystery 21 April 2009 By Bookworm I hadn’t come across this writer before, but I loved the book. If you like a straightforward story with no unpleasant surprises and good grammatical prose, then this one is certainly for you. An excellent book to take to bed and lull yourself gently to sleep. No hesitation in awarding Mr Fielding five stars. Bravo!
**** Very Good Value 3 September 2009 By M Smith REAL NAME I found this in an Oxfam shop and bought it for 30p. I’ve taken the price into account in marking it four stars. At full price maybe only three.
***** A Fine Police Procedural 12 December 2009 By ‘Churchman’ Peter Fielding’s latest book is well up to the standard of the previous ones. Sgt Fairfax is baffled by the discovery of a body outside the cathedral on Christmas Eve. Is it a tramp who has died of cold or is it ritual murder? Fielding allows the plot to unfold in his usual leisurely manner, with many interesting diversions into church architecture and history. Can’t recommend it strongly enough.
* Total Rubbish 15 December 2012 By Thrillseeker Anyone able to stay awake as far as page 7 will have guessed the denouement of this slim volume by Ethelred Tressider, writing here as Peter Fielding. Tressider has been penning the Buckfordshire series for some years now and must have exhausted almost every location in the fictional city of Buckford for the discovery of murder victims. This one turns up by the cathedral door, though nobody comments on the similarity with the discovery in an earlier book of a body in a pew in the same building. In Buckfordshire, it would seem, cathedrals are the normal place to recycle dead bodies. You can only conclude that Tressider finds his plots as unmemorable as the rest of us do, which is saying a great deal. I do so wish I could give the book no stars, but one is the minimum allowable. One star it is then.
CHAPTER THREE
The Old House at Home is no more than a ten-minute walk from where I now live. It is a large but rather cosy pub situated in the middle of the village, just where the main road from Chichester turns abruptly to the left and, rejecting as impractical the idea of fetching up against the dunes of East Head, elects to wander off toward Bracklesham. It is functional rather than picturesque, a Victorian building modernised so often that it has the air of having been constructed at no particular time and to no particular plan. But it has a bright and well-cared for appearance. It is the sort of place you’d readily stop if you wanted to break your journey for a meal, or that you’d call in on with the family on the way back from the beach. It also seemed like as good a place as any to start asking questions.
I know the barman well enough to call him Denzil and he knows me well enough to blink a couple of times, frown and call me Mr Treasurer or, on one occasion, Mr Treacle. It’s a tricky name.
‘Thanks, Denzil,’ I said as he pushed a half of bitter across the bar. Then I added casually: ‘I suppose you don’t remember who was in on New Year’s Eve?’
‘Now you’re asking,’ he said, with total accuracy but little elucidation. ‘Pretty much everybody was in, as you will have noticed yourself.’
‘I wasn’t here,’ I said.
‘Weren’t you? I could have sworn I served you.’
‘The night before, maybe,’ I said.
‘Really?’
If I had been hoping for total recall, this wasn’t it.
‘Do you remember seeing Henry Holiday? He’s a writer, like me.’
‘You a writer, then?’ he asked brightly.
‘Yes, I’m sure I’ve told you that. Maybe you’ve seen my books in the shops? I write mainly as Peter Fielding, but also as J. R. Elliott.’
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘But I only look in the crime section. What sort of thing do you write?’
‘Crime,’ I said.
‘Just crime?’
‘Well, some romantic fiction under another name.’
‘That would explain it, then,’ he said. ‘I don’t read romantic fiction.’ He was about to turn and go and check on a food order, when I added: ‘So, did you see Henry then? He was in with yet another crime writer: Crispin Vynall.’
‘Henry … Henry … Let me think … I’m not sure, but I certainly did see Crispin Vynall. I’ve read some of his books. They’re brilliant – there’s one where some kidnappers take this little kid and then video him being made to drink bleach so that the parents will—’
‘Sorry, Denzil, could I just stop you there and get you to tell me about Henry?’
‘What does he look like?’
I did my best to describe him. Denzil nodded encouragingly.
‘I sort of remember him,’ he said, probably meaning he had no recollection at all. ‘Weren’t you with them, though? I can almost picture the three of you over there by the fire, chatting away – the two of them getting on like nobody’s business and you slightly out of it, sipping a half of bitter.’
I put my half of bitter onto the counter. ‘No, I was at home,’ I said.
‘Shame. On your own on New Year’s Eve. And your friends a few yards away in the pub. You’d have thought they’d have sent you a text or something asking you to join them. You ought to get out more.’
‘It didn’t bother me. There was a really good programme on meerkats or something. I had all the excitement I needed. You don’t remember anything else about Crispin Vynall? What he was talking about, for example?’
‘I wouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations. As a barman you don’t. What’s said at the Old House at Home stays at the Old House at Home. But it was definitely Crispin Vynall. I’m pretty sure you came over to the bar and introduced him to me.’
‘That must have been Henry. I wasn’t here.’
‘You sure?’
‘Absolutely sure. I had meerkats to look after. What time did they leave, then?’
‘Mr Vynall must have left around ten or ten-thirty. I’m pretty sure of that, because a family came in and sat over there by the fire, and they’d been there at least an hour or two by midnight. Yes, maybe closer to ten than ten-thirty.’
‘And Henry left with him?’
‘Well, I don’t remember seeing him afterwards – let’s put it like that.’
‘Though, equally, you don’t remember seeing him before.’
‘That’s very true.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You’ve been helpful.’
I wondered whether I should tip him for this information. I was sure that was what Marlowe would have done. A five spot slipped across the bar that would lead to a phone call a couple of hours later with a vital clue. Denzil wasn’t really used to tips, and there was a danger that money passed across the counter for no apparent reason would simply unsettle him. As it happened, by the time I’d made up my mind the information was worth around 25p, Denzil had already gone to check on the food. He didn’t come back. I replaced the coins in my pocket, finished my drink and went out into the cold, wet day.
As I say, I was pretty sure where they had gone next. There simply weren’t that many options. Chichester is better for afternoon tea than nightlife. If Philip Marlowe had gone in search of seedy joints where naive punters are milked of all they have by twenty-year-old girls with world-weary faces and bright-red lipstick, he’d have drawn a complete blank. But I did know one nightclub.
It was more out by the ring road than actually in Chichester, in as desolate a spot as you’ll find within a five-mile radius of any prosperous cathedral city. Its concrete exterior blended well with the warehouses and carpet showrooms that were its immediate neighbours. I chose from the hundred or so empty spaces in the car park, slotting my silver Volvo neatly between the white lines, close to one of the other three cars that were already there. Then I picked my way round the puddles and found the only unlocked door into the building.
At three o’clock on a winter’s afternoon, the interior was dark and echoing. It succeeded in being both cold and stuffy. The walls were painted a matt black that probably did not feature at all in the Farrow & Ball colour chart and that seemed to close in on you as you watched. A vast and complex array of lighting equipment, which at the moment produced no light at all, was suspended from the black ceiling. A large stage was flanked with massive speakers and topped with turntables that currently did not turn and amplifiers that had nothing to amplify. It was the people and the noise that made this a venue worth coming to. At the moment it was an empty box, awaiting nightfall, when punters would take advantage of the £8 wristband deal and perhaps the offer of four Jägerbombs (whatever they were) for £9.95. The only action on the dance floor was an old guy in brown overalls pushing a broom in a leisurely manner. Nothing suggested that I was welcome. My footsteps echoed accusingly as I crossed the floor.
Of course, I was going to be out of place here at any time of the night or day. The club’s website showed a packed room with nobody over the age of twenty-five. At the time when I might have found an establishment of this sort interesting, none of its existing clientele would have even been born.
The assistant manager, once summoned by the man with the broom, looked as though he had qualified only recently as an adult. His chin sprouted fluffy ginger hair that might have been meant as a beard. He shook his head. ‘They left hours ago,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘If you’re looking for your son or daughter – we kicked the last of them out at around nine o’clock this morning. Our staff have to get some sleep too.’
‘I’m not looking for one of my children. Actually I don’t have any children and almost certainly never will have, but that’s beside the point.’
‘How can I help you, then? We’re not serving drinks at the moment.’
