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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: The Herring Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
Ethelred Tressider and his agent Elsie Thirkettle have been invited to lecture on a creative writing course at Fell Hall, a remote location in the heart of ragged countryside that even sheep are keen to shun. While Ethelred's success as a writer is distinctly average, Elsie sees this as an opportunity to scout for new, hopefully more lucrative, talent. But heavy snow falls overnight, trapping those early arrivals inside, and tensions are quick to emerge between the assembled group. When one of their number goes missing, Ethelred leads a search party and makes a gruesome discovery. With no phone signal and no hope of summoning the police, can Ethelred and Elsie identify the killer among them before one of them is next?
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Seitenzahl: 364
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
THE FIRST PASS
8
CHAPTER ONE
Ethelred
‘If I were to kill you somewhere like this,’ said the taxi driver cheerfully, ‘it would be months before they found the bits the buzzards didn’t want. Every time I drop a passenger off round here, I think: now, there’s a good place for a quiet murder.’
I nodded. Much the same thought had already occurred to me. During our drive up from the station, the valley had progressively narrowed and coarsened. Broad, orderly fields of winter wheat had given way to rough sheep pasture, then sheep pasture to dead bracken and wind-smashed reeds that even the sheep didn’t consider to be food. The bare limestone crags and the fan-shaped sheets of scree had a strangely industrial air, but were as natural here, and as grim, as the sky above – a billowing grey-black that presaged snow, though a few incongruous patches of bright blue still gleamed through. 10
‘No phone signal, of course,’ he continued, turning suddenly and heart-stoppingly from his view of the road to address me. ‘Not after Butterthwaite. Even if you were certain I was going to bump you off, you’d have no way of letting anyone know. Not even a final, desperate text to the family. Perfect crime, eh?’
‘Butterthwaite? Where’s that?’ I asked. My gaze was fixed on the road ahead – a single-track thread of dark tarmac with passing places at scarcely adequate intervals. The drystone walls, which had lined the road most of the way up, were no longer there for us to hit, but the steep and unguarded slope down to the stream on our left spoke of even better opportunities for premature death.
‘Three mile back,’ he said. He looked ahead again, perhaps curious to see how far we had come. ‘It was the last village we passed through, if you want to call it a village. School closed in 1911. Pub in 1963. They finally finished vandalising the telephone box in 1980. Just the farm and a row of holiday cottages now. The farm sells ice cream and cans of drink in the summer. That’s all it is. Walkers don’t come up this way much. That’s peat bog down there by the beck, that is. Never dries out in the summer and never seems to freeze in the winter. You’d be up to your knees in it if you went more than half a dozen yards. A man vanished without trace, a year or two back. His wife said he’d fallen behind as they both came down from the fells – he stopped to look at some peregrine falcons, she said. She was never that interested in raptors herself. Anyway, she just pressed on down to the main road and waited for him there. Eventually she caught the bus into Harrogate and had a cream tea at Betty’s. Plenty of people saw her there, 11but they never did find out what happened to the husband. The jury believed her story though. Or, like as not, they just thought he deserved it.’
‘They often do,’ said Elsie. She had taken the front passenger seat, though she had no need at all of the additional leg room it afforded, leaving me to fold myself into the back of the taxi as best I could, with her hard suitcase on the shiny, red fake-leather beside me. It bounced sharply into my thigh whenever we hit a bump.
‘As for Fell Hall at the top of the valley,’ said the driver, now speaking to me via the rear-view mirror, ‘well, nobody had lived in that for years and years until the Golden Age Trust took it over to run these writing courses.’
‘I suppose it’s called Fell Hall because it is right up in the fells?’ Elsie asked.
‘No, it’s named after Dr Gideon Fell. A detective. Apparently this chap, John Dickson Carr, wrote about him. Crime writer, you see. All their courses are crime writing up there. You’ll be crime writers yourselves if you’re going up to the hall today? I usually take the tutors up on Wednesday evening, then the students start to arrive on the Thursday morning, so I’m guessing you’re both writers.’
‘Do I look like a crime writer?’ asked Elsie pointedly.
‘Yes,’ said the driver, who was hopefully not expecting a tip from her.
‘He’s a writer,’ she said, jerking a plump thumb back in my direction. ‘That’s what writers look like. If they’re not careful. I’m his agent. And, fortunately, also the agent of a number of other writers, or I wouldn’t be able to afford the fare up here.’ 12
He nodded. That was an important consideration.
‘So, would I have heard of you, sir?’ he asked me.
‘Probably not,’ said Elsie.
‘He might have,’ I said.
‘I’m sure he only reads bestsellers,’ said Elsie. ‘Most sensible people do.’
‘No. I read all sorts of stuff,’ the taxi driver replied. ‘I get them from charity shops mainly. Books people don’t want to keep, like.’
Elsie shrugged. It was then perfectly possible that he knew me well.
‘What name do you write under?’ he asked.
‘Various names, but mainly as Peter Fielding,’ I said.
‘Come again?’
I repeated the name.
‘Who else?’ he asked.
‘J. R. Elliot?’
‘Thrillers?’
‘Historical mysteries. Reign of Richard the Second. The detective is called Master Thomas. He’s one of Chaucer’s clerks.’
‘Chaucer, eh? Sounds a bit too clever for me. Who else?’
‘Amanda Collins?’ I said.
‘Yes – definitely. Amanda Collins. I’m sure I’ve read some of them. Police procedurals, aren’t they? Set in Worthing? Really gruesome murders?’
‘No, they’re romantic comedies. No murders of any sort. I do those occasionally too.’
‘Not any more,’ said Elsie. ‘Your publisher’s dropped you.’
‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘I was waiting for the right moment.’ 13
The last small trace of blue sky had vanished. Mist was ominously rolling down the valley, or perhaps we were climbing up into the clouds. It was difficult to say. The driver crunched a gear change. He swore, switched the windscreen wipers on and peered with narrowed eyes at the road that rose in a long, sinuous curve, following the line of the valley. Large flakes of snow had started to fall. Down amongst the winter wheat, it was late for snow, but not up here. Up here, you felt, it would never be too late.
‘So, you teach them how to write crime novels, then?’ he asked me. ‘How to create red herrings, and so on?’
‘The course is for writers of traditional mysteries,’ said Elsie. ‘So, yes, it’s really all about herrings. Misdirecting the reader is the most important tool in their box. That and locked rooms. And railway timetables. Oh, and these days you’re also allowed at least one cynical, hungover detective fighting their own personal inner demons as they track down yet another serial killer.’
‘I bet there’s a bit more to it than that, though?’ he said. ‘Am I right?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Elsie. ‘You have to get somebody – somebody with a knowledge of the real world – to sell the book to a publisher – not an easy task, because publishers have been sold duds before and are now less and less trusting of the assurances of decent, honest agents. They want to check actual sales records these days, which can be inconvenient. Then you have to come up with a better title than the author’s one and design a really good cover with a blurb on the back that describes a book that somebody might actually want to read rather than the one 14the author wrote. Once the hard work’s done, you add the author’s eighty thousand words, minus the clichés, repetition, contradictions, dull bits, split infinitives and non sequiturs, and – if there are still any words left – you’ve got a book.’
‘She’s joking,’ I explained.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Is she now?’
‘That’s Fell Hall over there?’ asked Elsie.
The driver nodded and changed gear again. The road had finally ceased to climb, but the tarmac had given out as we passed between some massive stone gateposts, and we bumped the last few hundred yards over a rocky track that merged imperceptibly, in every direction, into the broad, misty moorland.
Ahead of us, an irregular black outline pierced by narrow, dimly lit windows could now be discerned through the enveloping septentrional gloom. Slowly the character of our destination became clearer – the slick slate roof, the rough-hewn stone walls, the randomly placed gables, the motley collection of outbuildings. Only the practised eye could have told which bits were medieval and which had been added in the nineteenth century by somebody with a morbid imagination; but it was clear that it had grown cautiously over the years, like the stunted trees we had passed on the road, keeping its own counsel but missing nothing that went on around it.
‘I think you’ve made it just in time,’ the driver said. ‘Another hour and there’ll be a couple inches of snow. Not good on these gradients – or not with my tyres, anyway. Do you want a hand with that suitcase, love?’ 15
‘No,’ said Elsie, who knew that she didn’t have to tip me, however large and heavy the bag. ‘Ethelred will carry it. Under one nom de plume or another.’
‘I’ll do it as Amanda Collins, shall I?’ I said.
‘She doesn’t have anything else to do, poor cow,’ said Elsie.
CHAPTER TWO
Ethelred
‘You must be Elsie Thirkettle,’ said the course director, shaking her hand. ‘I’m Wendy Idsworth.’ She checked a list on her clipboard. ‘And you are Peter Fielding?’
Wendy’s voice was southern, middle class. Though I’d been only a couple of hours up here in the North, it already sounded incongruous, foreign, affected, though it was much as I spoke myself.
‘It’s one of the names I write under,’ I said. ‘My real name is Ethelred. Ethelred Tressider.’
‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows.
‘After King Ethelred the First – not Ethelred the Unready. My father was always very clear on that point. It was an important distinction for him, and he could never quite understand why it wasn’t one for other people.’
She nodded. She was definitely with other people on that.
‘So, would you like us to call you Peter or Ethelred?’ she enquired. 17
I paused for a moment too long.
‘Call him Ethelred,’ said Elsie. ‘Peter makes him sound almost normal.’
Wendy mouthed all three Anglo-Saxon syllables of ‘Ethelred’ as she amended the list of tutors on her clipboard. That was that, then. I was not to escape being Ethelred, not even for the weekend. She tapped the metal clip with her pen and nodded again.
She was a short, thin woman with dark hair. Her face seemed prematurely wrinkled, as do the faces of many who spend a lot of their time out on the fells. Wendy was resident director – she remained summer and winter, organising courses, overseeing repairs to the ancient structure of Fell Hall, walking the trails whenever the opportunity arose. She must have sat out many lonely, snowy nights and days. But apparently she enjoyed her solitude. She was in fact something of a legend in the writing world, though a rarely seen one. I’d run into her once in Harrogate, when she’d visited the crime writing festival for a day, but she’d been back up in the fells before most of us hit the bar, which was pretty early. The fliers advertising the Fell Hall courses were written by her, but never featured her photograph, not even in the background of some cheerful group of writers and would-be writers. It was as if she were the ghost in the machine of the Golden Age Trust, to which she was wholly devoted.
‘You’re in Ripon,’ she said, passing me two keys. ‘Ripon’s a small single room but quite adequate for a short stay. The second key is for the front door if you need it, though I imagine you won’t be going out much after dark in this weather. Elsie, we’ve put you in the Malham Suite, as you requested. I think you’ll find it very comfortable indeed. The 18various settings for the bath are quite complicated, but there is a manual in the bathroom, next to the towel heater. Both rooms are up on the first floor – Ripon’s some way beyond Malham, at the very end of the corridor. Try stuffing a flannel or something in the gap in the window, Ethelred, if it gets too cold for you. Are you both OK with your bags?’
‘Ethelred can manage everything,’ said Elsie. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Wendy noticed a presence hovering at her shoulder. A large young woman with a ruddy face and untidy blonde hair. ‘Yes, Jenny?’ she said.
‘I’ve put the two girls in Giggleswick,’ Jenny reported. She wiped her hands on her apron – a reflex action indicating a completed task, unless the girls had been particularly wet. ‘I’ve also prepped the veg and the pie’s done and ready to go in the oven whenever you like. If that’s all, I’ll go back down in the next taxi.’
Wendy shook her head. ‘All of the tutors are now here. Unless there is another wholly unauthorised arrival of participants, there’s no way of getting back into town tonight. I can’t drive you; I’m needed at the Hall. And obviously there’s no way of phoning for a taxi.’
‘But you promised … my mum’s birthday.’
‘I need you here tomorrow, Jenny, bright and early.’
‘My car might be fixed by tomorrow. If it’s not, I could have got a lift from Dad, first thing in the morning. He wouldn’t have minded a break from the farm.’
‘The road may be blocked with snow by then.’
‘In that case nobody will get here and there’s no course to run. You wouldn’t need me.’
‘Don’t be pert, Jenny. I’ve warned you about that before. There are no more taxis coming up and no way of getting 19one for you – even if a driver was prepared to come up here so late and in the snow.’
‘But I told you—’
‘You did tell me, but I don’t believe I promised anything.’
‘With no phone reception up here, I can’t even call Mum to wish her happy birthday.’
‘I don’t have time for this now, Jenny. Just scamper along to the kitchen, there’s a good girl. That pie won’t put itself in the oven, will it? I’ll join you as soon as I can.’
Jenny looked at Wendy as if she could happily murder her, but just said ‘I’ll get on with dinner then, shall I?’
‘Thank you, Jenny. That would be very kind. I’ll come and check what you’re doing in a moment.’ She turned to us. ‘Everyone will muck in tomorrow when all of the participants are here, but the first evening, with just the tutors, we cook for you.’
‘Did Jenny say the participants had started to arrive though?’ I asked.
Wendy rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Yes, two of them. Claimed they’d got the wrong start time. I’ve put them together in the smallest double. I suppose they’ll have to join us for dinner. We can’t actually let them starve to death, can we?’
‘Starve to death?’ I said. ‘Definitely not. They should join us.’
Wendy looked disappointed at my wimpish response. You could always get more participants. There was usually a waiting list for each course.
‘They’ll be in the way when we’re discussing the programme tonight. That’s the whole point of the tutors arriving ahead of the participants. To finalise what you will 20all do, without any distractions. I suppose we can send the girls to bed early. I have some decent whisky I was planning to open later – for the tutors, not the participants. And I’ve told them firmly to stay out of the way until it’s time to eat. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and see what sort of mess Jenny is getting into on her own.’
‘I’m glad I don’t work for her,’ I said, once she had gone.
‘I’d employ her though,’ said Elsie. ‘She won’t let unimportant things like people or common decency stop her meeting her targets.’
‘Efficient,’ I said.
‘An administrative legend,’ said Elsie. ‘The goddess of timetabling and booking systems.’
‘She’s been director since the centre opened,’ I said.
‘Indeed. Appointed by the founder of the trust.’
‘Who is or was a fan of John Dickson Carr? The name of the trust and the hall are a bit of a give-away.’
‘To be honest nobody knows a lot about the founder. He’s an American called Hiram Shuttleworth. He was in finance apparently, and he’d traced his family roots back to this part of the world. He decided to use a few millions of his accumulated wealth to buy High End Hall, as it was called then, renovate it and turn it into a study centre for teaching and for research into crime fiction written during the Golden Age of the 1920s and ’30s, including but not limited to the Anglo-American John Dickson Carr. The post was never advertised, much to the annoyance of several writers with a love of both classic crime fiction and the great outdoors. Wendy was just given it. But not many people would have stuck it up here with the wind and the rain and the snow. If you didn’t love it, no money 21on earth would make it worthwhile. She wasn’t such a bad choice. They say that she’s never taken a whole day off since she arrived here.’
‘That would be contrary to the Working Time Directive,’ I said.
‘Not on this side of Butterthwaite, apparently.’
‘She’s a writer herself?’ I asked.
‘Publishing background, did somebody say? Editing? Another John Dickson Carr fan certainly – I’ve heard her lecture on him. She’s not a bundle of laughs but she’s thorough.’
‘You’ve met her before then?’
‘Once. You don’t get to see her much unless you come up here.’
‘Did you ever hear the rumour she used to be a spy – that she still is one?’ I asked.
‘Everyone’s heard that one. CIA, somebody told me.’
‘But you don’t believe it?’
‘Even the grimmest of CIA operatives occasionally allow themselves to break into a half-smile.’
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘I’ll drop your bag off on my way to my room, shall I?’
CHAPTER THREE
Elsie
I was already in the main sitting room when Ethelred came back down, having unpacked his little bag. I had been enjoying the ambience – the diffused light from the table lamps scattered round the room, the old and comfortable sofas covered with faded William Morris fabric, the low beamed ceiling, the roaring fire in the vast stone fireplace, the storm rattling the narrow casement windows. It was a picture of England drawn by somebody who clearly loved it but hadn’t been there lately.
Sadly, though this was Ethelred’s natural habitat, his arrival did nothing to enhance the charming representation of a bygone era. He was one of the unhappiest bunnies in the North. Ripon, he said, had proved even smaller and colder than he had feared, and the ceiling height was inconveniently low. There was no desk for him to work at, because there was no space for one. And blah, blah, blah. After a bit, I started listening again. 23
‘Did I ask you to be as tall as you are?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think so. Don’t complain to me about ceiling heights. I am responsible for negotiating your book contracts and the payment of advances and royalties after very reasonable agency deductions. Anyway, some bits of the room must be over six foot high.’
He looked mournful, though he does that even when things are going really well. ‘The ceiling is mainly sloping,’ he said. ‘I think it must have been a storeroom originally. I can only stand upright in a couple of places.’
‘There you are then. How many places can you be in at any one time? I mean, you’re not God. You’re not obliged to be omnipresent. You have a place to stand up and a spare one if you feel like moving around. And you can lie down, can’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can lie down, though a longer bed would also be helpful.’
‘You wouldn’t want a long bed in a room that small. And, as I said, it was entirely your decision to be tall. It’s not a mistake I ever made.’
‘How is your room?’ he enquired, with only partly justified suspicion.
‘My suite, you mean? I haven’t had time to explore it all yet,’ I said. ‘Ask me in a day or so.’
‘How …?’ He frowned, as he often does when things puzzle him.
‘How did I get a better room than you? Forward planning, Ethelred. The moment I agreed to do this gig, I checked on the internet for reviews of the courses … have I ever explained the internet to you?’ 24
He looked even more mournful and said that he used the internet all the time, as I knew well.
‘Then,’ I continued patiently, ‘you could have easily discovered on Tripadvisor that Malham was the master bedroom suite of the former owner of the house and much in demand. I emailed at once, and my small and very reasonable request was granted, while you were probably still sharpening your quill pen and looking for a sheep to kill in order to make parchment.’
‘Actually I emailed too, though I’m not sure how she gets emails up here. There isn’t a landline and there’s no mobile reception at all.’
‘I suppose she drives down to Butterthwaite,’ I said. ‘You can get a signal there. She downloads everything and comes back here to draft replies. Then she goes back down again a few days later to send them. I think modern technology impacts on her life even less than it does on yours.’
‘I’m surprised you can do business like that in the modern world.’
‘Ethelred, trust me, you know nothing about the modern world. It’s not somewhere you’ve ever been.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to be this cut off myself. What if she had an accident?’
‘If she really wanted an accident, she’d have to drive down to Butterthwaite to have it. Otherwise, she’d have to manage without. Generations must have lived up here, when you think about it, contentedly cut off from the rest of society. It’s only the twenty-first century that thinks it has to be online twenty-four seven in order not to miss out.’
He nodded. He didn’t doubt for one moment that the 25past had been a better and happier world, and that the 1950s had been the best of all. In a way he was right – I mean, those skirts! Those elbow-length gloves! Those pillbox hats! Those crazy sunglasses! Wall-to-wall rock-and-roll in cafes made entirely of red and cream vinyl! But I’m not sure that’s the side of it that he was thinking of.
‘I suppose she must really like the isolation,’ he said eventually.
The door opened, so we immediately stopped talking until we’d checked it wasn’t Wendy. It proved to be a writer whom I knew quite well, dressed in his usual black jeans, black T-shirt and leather jacket.
‘Good to see you, Jasper,’ I said, kissing him an inch or so from both cheeks. He possessed one of those untrustworthy faces that you didn’t want to get too close to, in case you caught deviousness. And anyway he always had a covering of itchy dark stubble on his chin. The gap between his front teeth, endearing in most people, simply added to the impression he was a disreputable minor character from a black-and-white movie. All he was lacking was the pencil moustache and the ebony cigarette holder. In that sense at least, he and Ethelred were blood brothers. ‘You two know each other, I take it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Jasper Lavant replied, showing the classic Mid-Century incisor gap to perfection. ‘We were on a panel together at Bristol last year.’
‘I think not,’ said Ethelred.
‘Well, it was somebody very much like you. We had a conversation about royalties. You were saying you were earning so little, you might as well give up writing. Only tutoring was keeping you going.’ 26
‘Not me,’ said Ethelred.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘It sounds very much like you, Ethelred. Was it said in a really self-pitying way?’
‘Yes,’ said Jasper.
‘It still wasn’t me,’ said Ethelred.
‘Murder Unlimited is selling well,’ I said, turning to Jasper. ‘Number two in the Sunday Times last weekend. Well done, you!’
‘Yes, it’s had a bit of a resurgence since they announced the TV series.’
I caught Ethelred’s eye for an instant. We both knew that Jasper’s next four books had been complete dross, but his debut, Murder Unlimited, had made him a packet. And his first post-TV book would probably be quite profitable too. He was still worth having as a client if I could prise him away from his current agent, whoever that was. I had two and a half days to butter him up.
‘A truly great book,’ I said, as sincerely as I could manage without actually sicking up.
‘Thank you.’
‘A classic.’
‘You are too kind.’
‘The sort of book you can’t put down. A real page-turner.’
‘It had some good reviews,’ he said, with a very poor attempt at a modest smile.
I decided to stop there, never having read it. You can get badly caught out by being too specific about a book you’ve merely considered reading if you run out of other stuff. Now I realised I should have promoted it up the to-be-read pile and glanced at the opening chapter. Of course, I couldn’t download it onto my 27Kindle here. But maybe there would be a dog-eared copy on the bookshelves. It was the sort of book you regularly found abandoned on the bookshelves of guest houses and holiday cottages, treated as some reader’s plaything, then cruelly tossed aside. Still, if you keep telling an author his books are wonderful, he rarely tests your knowledge chapter by chapter.
‘You came up by train?’ asked Ethelred conversationally.
‘That was the advice, wasn’t it?’ said Jasper. ‘Reduce the centre’s carbon footprint. The comment about the state of the road up here was also an inducement to leave the Porsche at home.’
Other writers might have just said ‘car’. Jasper had however spotted an opportunity to remind us that he normally drove the sort of car that people like us only ever saw as a puff of exhaust vanishing down the fast lane. I suspected he’d driven one for years. He’d been in banking or something before he became an author. Financially, he probably needed a TV series less than any other writer I knew. But he had the contract, signed and sealed, with a household name already recruited to play the lead. That life might be fair has never been an assumption of my agency’s business plan.
‘I wonder why Wendy does it?’ said Jasper. ‘Living up here, I mean. Rumour has it that she never leaves.’
‘I’ve met her at Harrogate,’ said Ethelred.
‘Yes, I mean obviously she gets away for a few hours now and then, but not for long apparently. I’ve heard—’ Jasper looked quickly towards the door. ‘Word on the street is that she’s part of some MI6 operation, based here at the hall. The whole courses thing is just a front.’ 28
‘Why would MI6 want a base in the middle of nowhere?’ asked Ethelred.
‘That’s the point of it,’ said Jasper. He tapped the side of his nose to tell u that what he was about to say was both in confidence and undeniably true. ‘It’s a sort of safe house where they can hide somebody when they need to. No one sees them come or go. And if it gets too hot here, they can head off to some shepherd’s hut close by.’
‘You know that, then?’ asked Ethelred stiffly. He didn’t much like Jasper, in spite of the shared nostalgia thing. Not many people did when they got to know Jasper well. Too smug. Too full of being Jasper. Too obviously rich in a profession that mainly isn’t.
‘Research, dear boy,’ he said. ‘I have a few contacts who happen to be in that line of work. They tell me things.’
‘I would have thought that the Official Secrets Act would have limited what they could reveal.’
‘You’d be surprised. I’ve reached the stage when pals from my university days have got themselves quite high up in all sorts of organisations – some of which Joe Public has probably never even heard of. Insider knowledge and good solid research is what distinguishes the best fiction from the mediocre.’
‘Hmm,’ said Ethelred, who probably hadn’t updated his police procedures since he started writing crime fiction, at a time when you could still have a good night out for five shillings and listen to Arthur Askey on the wireless when you got home.
I wondered if Jasper really knew anything we didn’t, or even believed what he was saying. Jasper practised 29bullshitting in the way a violinist practises scales. And I didn’t rate Jasper’s research that highly if the best he could come up with was a shepherd’s hut. I mean, honestly? Hadn’t they all been sold off to former cabinet ministers to write their memoirs in? But then I remembered the buttering-up thing and the fifteen-per-cent-of-the-advance thing relating to his next TV-tie-in book, which would sell so much better than the recent shit ones, even if it was shit too. I took a deep breath.
‘Absolutely, Jasper,’ I said. ‘Insider knowledge and good solid research. You are so right. I mean – Murder Unlimited – the background research that must have gone into that! So impressive.’
‘In what way?’ he asked.
I revised my assumption that writers never cross-examined you when you were giving them ridiculously lavish compliments.
‘In every possible way,’ I said.
‘But you mean a particular part of the plot?’
‘The ending,’ I said. It seemed safe. Most books have endings. His probably did too. I’d check when I could get hold of a copy.
‘That’s odd. The one criticism I’ve had of the book was the ending. The TV people want to change it.’
‘Do they? Idiots! It’s a great ending. Trust me.’
‘I’d do it differently if I were writing the book now.’
‘Well, I think it takes tremendous skill to do it your way,’ I said. ‘So, tell me about the TV—’
‘What do you mean exactly?’ Jasper was understandably puzzled, having read his book himself and knowing how it ended. ‘You liked my making it 30obvious who the killer is early on, and then not putting in the final twist that everyone was expecting?’
‘Yes. That’s it. A masterstroke. It’s the sort of thing Christie might have done.’
‘But actually didn’t. So – let’s get this right – you really have read the book?’
‘Obviously. Cover to cover.’
‘And you say you quickly realised who the killer was?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wasn’t there one of the other characters you suspected along the way? I mean there must have been somebody?’
You really needed to have at least read the blurb on the back to have a chance of getting that one right. Of course, I could make an inspired guess. What were the chances of a suspect called Smith? Quite good? Or I could randomly plump for a name like Juliet. No, better not risk it.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I didn’t suspect any of the others.’
‘Not even Juliet?’ he asked. ‘I mean she had a pretty good motive, didn’t she?’
‘Juliet! Ha! You almost had me fooled there,’ I said with a care-free choking noise. ‘I admit that. But I’ve read a lot of crime fiction.’
‘You do actually like crime fiction then?’
At first sight, this was a much easier question to answer. But my brain was no longer functioning at that basic level. A simple ‘yes’ would no longer satisfy its overwhelming need for evasion and ambiguity.
‘Like it?’ I said. ‘Hell, does a rat catcher like rats?’
‘OK. Fair enough …’ He was looking at me oddly. We were both wondering exactly what rat catchers did think of 31rats. Plague-spreaders but totally essential to their business model? Maybe that.
It was then that the door opened, and we all turned towards it, which was fine with me because I was done with buttering up and wanted to quit while I was ahead.
‘Hi, Hal,’ said Ethelred to the young man who had just arrived.
‘Hi, Ethelred,’ he replied.
‘Do you both know Hal Compton?’ Ethelred asked us.
Jasper didn’t, though he had heard of him and congratulated Hal on the success of his latest book. I did know him and, this time, had actually read the book in question, because he’d sent it to me and I’d turned it down. These things happen. Still, I had good reason to have noticed that The Spy Before Yesterday had been number one on the same Sunday Times list that had featured Jasper as number two. The course participants were, if you ignored Ethelred, getting value for money this weekend. Hal Compton’s career had been the mirror image of Jasper’s. His early books – humorous crime fiction with G. K. Chesterton as the detective – had scarcely been noticed by reviewers and had not sold well. Then he’d switched, suddenly and unexpectedly, to thrillers and now The Spy Before Yesterday looked like being the crime novel of the year. That was why you hung onto people like Ethelred – however bad their current sales were – you just never knew when they might suddenly make their breakthrough. Of course, I’d chosen the wrong one to keep and the wrong one to reject, but the principle was still sound.
I placed a hand on the sleeve of Hal’s pale blue cashmere 32sweater. It felt of vastly increased royalty payments. ‘I’m really pleased that your book is doing so well,’ I said. I hoped Jasper didn’t notice the difference between what I’d said to him earlier and what I was saying when I was being genuine, because I was pleased for Hal, in spite of his being with another agent. Of course, I’d stolen clients from Francis and Nowak before, and there’s no legal quota on the number of writers you’re allowed to steal from a rival agency, but from what I knew of Hal he was too decent to desert Janet Francis when she’d sold his most successful book for him. I respected that totally. Obviously I was still going to try though.
He looked slightly embarrassed in a way that Jasper had not and said ‘Yes, it came at exactly the right time. My last publisher had dropped me, we’d just had a baby and I was getting fairly desperate about cash flow. I thought I might actually have to get a real job. Then I suddenly seemed to hit on the right idea …’ His voice tailed off and just for a moment I thought he was actually going to blush. ‘Well, there it is. There’s a lot of luck in these things. Well done on the television series, by the way, Jasper.’
‘As you say, there’s often a lot of luck in these things,’ said Jasper. He placed a slight but significant emphasis on ‘often’.
Hal flicked away a boyish lock of blonde hair and smiled. ‘Did any of you hear the row from the kitchen just now? Wendy and her minion were having a bit of a disagreement.’
‘Jenny Cosham,’ said Ethelred, who must have been interested enough to ask somebody what Jenny’s surname was. 33
‘I overheard a bit,’ said Jasper. ‘As I came past the door. Jenny wanted to go to her mother’s birthday party tonight, but the snow has stopped her. Tough luck for the girl.’
‘I think Wendy was always planning to keep her here tonight, if she could,’ said Ethelred. ‘I don’t think that not telling her our taxi was there was any sort of accident.’
This was probably true. Wendy did not tolerate randomness of any sort. I’m not saying that she’d already planned out the rest of her life day by day, but she’d established the general principles of how it would be, both for herself and for others – especially others.
‘Her entire existence is devoted to the centre,’ said Jasper. ‘She thinks everyone else’s should be too. She’s – what do you call it? – a bit obsessive-compulsive. Everything has to be in exactly the right place – things and people. I tried to rearrange the seating plan one evening on another course. I think she’d have been hurt less if I’d kicked her on the knee.’
‘Maybe that’s why she likes it here,’ said Ethelred. ‘It’s a place where she has complete control over every little detail. When we’re here and, even more so, when we all go away.’
Hal looked towards the door. I already knew what he was going to say.
‘Don’t breathe a word of this,’ he said, ‘but I have heard the Golden Age Trust is just a front for a Mossad operation in England. And Wendy is running it for them. They say that the founder, this American called Shuttleworth, has Israeli connections and that—’
The door opened again, and Wendy’s face appeared round it. 34
‘Why are you all looking so startled?’ she asked. ‘Dinner will be served in exactly five minutes. Please check the seating plan as you go in. There’s nothing worse than people who don’t stick to the plan.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Elsie
The two girls were already there. Wendy had placed them at one end of the table – the end furthest from the door. The rest of us took our places according to the Famous Plan. Hal was next to one of the girls, Ethelred next to the other, Wendy at the top of the table, me and Jasper facing each other across it in the remaining two seats. I couldn’t see any logic to where we all were, but it clearly pleased Wendy, and Wendy was actually queen regnant of obsessive-compulsive. Nobody doubted that. One of the girls, the smaller and – I’m being totally upfront with you here – mousier one, proved to be called Claire Rowland. She scarcely occupied a space at all, thinking about it. It was as if she’d been given a chair that was six inches lower than everyone else’s, though Wendy would have made sure all of the chairs in the dining room matched perfectly. Her brasher friend, with the crimson hair, burgundy lipstick, purple headscarf and 36denim dungarees was Fliss Verity. Draped diagonally across Fliss’s chest was the even more colourful strap of a large shoulder bag that she must have purchased in Bhutan or possibly Hoxton. She had not forgiven Wendy for confining them to their rooms for an hour and had not forgiven Claire for her mistake.
‘Well,’ she said, a cheerfulness that she wished us all to know was forced, ‘I’m so sorry you’re having to put up with our company tonight, but my very good friend here was convinced that we had to arrive this evening for an early start tomorrow. We’ll stay out of your way as much as possible.’
Like a lot of people these days, her accent was difficult to tie down – Midlands certainly, but overlain or underlain with the other places where she’d lived and worked.
Jasper leered at her, showing the tooth-gap in its full glory. ‘No need to stay out of my way,’ he said. ‘Delighted to have your company, my dear. I’m Jasper Lavant, by the way.’
‘Yes,’ said Fliss. ‘So you are.’
Jasper blinked, unsure whether he had been firmly put down or simply had his name confirmed for him, a service that Fliss was happy to provide for older people who might otherwise forget.
Ethelred chose this moment to tell the girls that he was Ethelred. ‘Writing as Peter Fielding mainly these days,’ he added. He sounded more apologetic than he really needed to be.
‘I like your J. R. Elliot books best,’ said Claire. ‘You must know a lot about the period. When I read the books 37I really feel I’m back in the fourteenth century. You can almost smell what it was like.’
We all turned to her because, apart from introducing herself, this was the first thing she’d said. Our gaze alone was enough to make her dry up completely. Several of us were also wondering whether smelling the fourteenth century was actually safe.
‘Thank you,’ said Ethelred, with a self-deprecating smile that a Victorian maiden could not have improved on. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘She’s read all your books, Ethelred,’ said Fliss, stifling a yawn and looking for the wine bottle. ‘A big fan. Aren’t you, Claire?’
There was honestly only one possible answer to that question, in view of her earlier statement, but Claire was now reluctant to commit herself one way or the other in case we all looked at her again. She smiled shyly, at least not denying it.
Ethelred’s big fan was dressed that evening in a brown sweater over a brown, floral patterned blouse, which strengthened the impression that she was, in real life, a mouse, who had stumbled in from the cold outside and was hoping not to be noticed as she scurried around picking up literary crumbs.
Though Fliss had stepped quickly into a gap that she saw developing in the conversation, the gap had appeared anyway. Somebody needed to say something.
‘Well, I may as well introduce myself too,’ I said. ‘I’m Elsie Thirkettle.’
This time, Claire decided to respond, even though it might give away her location to a passing owl. ‘Yes, I 38know,’ she squeaked. ‘You’re Ethelred’s agent. It says so in several places on his website. He obviously admires you enormously.’
I glanced over at Ethelred to see whether he was about to reveal that I had designed his website for him, but a look from me convinced him that now was not a great time.
‘And this is Hal Compton,’ said Wendy, indicating the other bestselling member of the party.
Hal smiled weakly.
‘Hello, Hal,’ said Claire.
‘You know each other already?’ asked Wendy.
