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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: The Herring Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
When obscure crime writer Ethelred Tressider vanishes from his home, his indefatigable agent, Elsie Thirkettle, is soon on his trail. Finding him proves surprisingly easy. Bringing him home is another matter. Having followed Ethelred to a hotel in the French Loire, she finds herself confined there with him after a prominent philatelist is murdered. Elsie is torn between her natural desire to interfere in the police investigation and her urgent need to escape to the local chocolatier.
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Seitenzahl: 324
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Ten Little Herrings
L. C. TYLER
To my parents
(with apologies for the theft of a name)
The man in the wilderness said to me,
‘How many strawberries grow in the sea?’
I answered him, as I thought good,
‘As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the characters and events in this book are fictitious. The passage at the start of chapter four, where the publisher voluntarily offers a writer improved terms, is pure fantasy.
PROLOGUE
The only strange thing about my telephone conversation with Ethelred was that he had been dead for almost a year.
Well, you know how it is. You’re sitting in a dead person’s flat round about midnight. The Sussex rain is chucking itself against the period sash windows. A floorboard creaks, hopefully in one of the adjoining flats. The phone rings. You answer it, as you do, slightly cautiously.
‘Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ I said, that being the name of the dead person – though using the word ‘residence’ to represent Ethelred’s poky little flat was perhaps stretching the truth just a touch.
There was a long pause as if the caller had not been expecting or particularly wanting a reply.
‘Zat eez zer residence of Meester Tressider?’ said the caller in what can only be described as a crap accent.
‘That was what I meant when I said it was Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ I replied. I found this exchange strangely reassuring in the sense that a phone ringing in a cold, damp, dead-person’s flat in the hush of a rural night was spooky. Finding I had a complete tosser at the other end of the line showed it was just another day at the office.
‘Meester Tressider, the famous writer?’
It was the word ‘famous’ that made me suspicious.
‘Who is that?’ I asked.
There was another long pause indicating that the caller had not quite decided.
‘I am sorry to trouble you, madam. It eez British Gaz,’ said the voice, touchingly pleased with itself. ‘I just want to check if Meester Tressider’s thermostat eez set at an appropriate temperature for zer winter.’
‘Ethelred?’ I said. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’
This time the voice did not hesitate.
‘No,’ it said. ‘Is British Gaz. Complimentary safety check.’
‘At midnight?’
‘So sorry, memsahib. It is not midnight at the call centre. In Bangalore we are all working so very hard.’
Actually (I do know where Bangalore is) it would have been around five a.m., but that wasn’t what gave it away.
‘Why has your accent changed from German to Welsh?’ I asked.
‘Not Welsh, Indian. In Bangalore we are all so, so Indian. Please can you confirm Mr Tressider’s thermostat has been correctly adjusted for your English winter.’
‘Ethelred, stop pissing about,’ I said, on the grounds that one of us needed to come to the point. ‘The thermostat is just fine for a dead person’s flat. If you think you may not be dead, I’ll set it a notch or two higher. Now, you dim tart, where exactly are you?’
‘Dead?’ said the voice. There was a note of concern there that was not entirely central-heating related. It was at this point that I remembered that news of his death might not have reached him – something I was going to have to explain to him in due course. And preferably in much more coherent fashion than I am now explaining it to you. Oh … and I’d killed him, by the way. Yes, it was going to take some careful explaining at some point.
Ethelred Tressider, for I was sure that it was he, would have made a better job of telling the story. As an obscure yet experienced crime writer, he knew all about plotting, characterisation, pacing and so on and so forth. He would not have had a phone call from a dead person on page one and the accidental revelation of the killer on page two. As an obscure yet experienced crime writer he would still have been carefully setting the scene, explaining who everyone was. He would not have plunged randomly into the story leaving the readers to follow or not as they preferred. And, as an obscure but experienced crime writer, he was going to be pretty pissed off to discover I had killed him.
An apology was probably called for.
‘Ethelred, you dickhead,’ I said, ‘you realise this is entirely your fault?’
‘All Mr Tressider’s fault?’ The voice now sounded hurt as well as Welsh.
‘Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Where are you, Ethelred? I need to know … for certain reasons that I shall explain when I see you.’
‘Bangalore,’ said the voice, making one last pathetic attempt to convince itself.
‘That’s Bangalore, Cardiganshire?’
‘I am not knowing what is Cardiganshire.’
‘Nos da,’ I said.
‘Nos da,’ said the voice sadly.
And I hung up. Well, if he wanted to play silly buggers, I’d leave him to stew for a while.
Of course, the moment I hung up I regretted it. After all, I’d waited almost a year for this call – those strange eleven months since Ethelred had died so tragically and improbably at my hands.
Now that he was back in contact, I was forced to re-examine my motives for doing what I had done. It wasn’t jealousy exactly. I really am not the jealous type of girl, as you well know. Ethelred was nothing to me and, while I am sure that he lusted after my size 12 (some labels anyway) figure, I was probably nothing to him either. But the fact remained that he had chosen to desert me and fly off to rejoin his Floozy: the Scarlet Woman whose name will never be typed by my fingers. You could argue that all middle-aged writers are entitled to one floozy. But she was the wrong floozy for him. Honestly. It really had been kinder to kill Ethelred there and then.
A creaking floorboard and another sudden death rattle from the aged sash window brought me back to the here and now. I listened to a series of thumps, then silence reigned again in West Sussex. Was somebody’s dodgy prostate causing them to take a midnight trip to the bathroom? I reminded myself that I did not believe in ghosts, not even ghosts of technically dead crime writers.
What I needed to do was track Ethelred down and sort all this out. Explain to him in what senses he was dead and, to look on the bright side, in what senses he was alive. Explain to him in which (minor) ways it might be my fault and in which ways it was definitely entirely his fault. Amid all of this confusion, what I had to do was to focus on some hard facts and figures. The figure that immediately came to mind was fifteen per cent (twenty-five per cent film, foreign and translation rights). Yes, that was the one thing that I could be certain of. Whether he was dead or alive, I was still Ethelred’s agent.
CHAPTER ONE
I haven’t always been an agent.
When I was young, I wanted to be a vet. I liked the idea of looking after creatures with minimal intelligence that needed somebody to sweep up after them. I wanted to spend my time with lower forms of life that were incapable of answering me back. It didn’t take me long to work out my true vocation in life.
The Elsie Thirkettle Agency quickly attracted a number of promising young authors of high literary merit, but I managed to dump most of them. It’s a question of quantity, not quality, you see. The agricultural revolution was all about getting two crops a year out of a field that previously gave you one. It’s much the same with books. The royalties on a book that has taken five years to produce are usually pretty much the same as on one written in six months. I can double-, sometimes treble-, crop my authors. There were a number of laws that I was able to formulate:
1) Elsie’s First Law – Get the manuscript out of their grubby little hands the moment they hit the required number of words. A second draft will be better in some ways but it will certainly be much worse in others. Just send it to a publisher and let the nice editor do the rest. Do by all means check first that it is actually a different plot from the previous book – but see Elsie’s Second Law.
2) Elsie’s Second Law – Always get them to write a sequel if they know how. After all, they’ve got the characters. They’ve checked out the locations. They’ve hooked a few unwitting punters. It’s true that producing sequels is a sure sign of the second-rate author but, then again, see Elsie’s Third Law.
3) Elsie’s Third Law – Books by second- or even third-rate authors cost as much as books by first-rate authors. This is odd, when you think about it. It’s a bit like charging the same for mink as for fake nylon fur on the grounds that it’s still a coat. Or charging the same for Lafite as for red plonk. Or charging the same for good and bad chocolate (though, obviously, there is no such thing as bad chocolate). You wouldn’t think you could do it, but see Elsie’s Fourth Law.
4) Elsie’s Fourth Law – It’s amazing what you can get away with.
Ethelred was one of my successes. In the early days he hankered after prizes and critical acclaim but, once I had explained things to him properly, I could get at least two, sometimes three or four, books a year under a variety of pen-names. He wrote mainly detective stories but he also wrote romantic fiction. What gave his romances such poignancy was, I think, his long and consistent experience of being dumped by a variety of women, and repeatedly by his (ex-) wife. He deserved better. Not me necessarily, but somebody very much like me.
Then he hit some sort of mid-life crisis and decided to clear off with the Scarlet Woman (whose name will never etc. etc.) without telling me a thing until he was safely out of the country. It was only right that, sometime later, I should have failed to consult him over his death.
I might have believed he had intended to vanish permanently had he not left painstakingly detailed instructions with me for the maintenance of his boiler while he was away. He was the sort of crime writer who worries a lot about his boiler.
As his literary agent I was of course not only responsible for his boiler. In his absence, I paid his bills, opened any of his mail that looked interesting, transferred his royalties (less reasonable agency deductions) to his account and checked his bank and credit card statements for any clue as to where he was or what he was doing. Visiting the flat from time to time also enabled me to ensure that everything else was well and to reassure his neighbours that he was still travelling to research his next novel. Very occasionally (because it was a long journey back) I stayed over. Actually it wasn’t really that far back to Hampstead but, when I was in the flat, reassuringly surrounded by his shapeless tweedy jackets, his tatty old Barbour and his green wellies, it was easier to believe that his absence was merely the temporary aberration that I was telling people it was.
The bank statements and the rest of it, however, pointed to the reverse. Financially he was flat-lining. No indication of life at all. In my case, my credit card statement is one of my vital signs – when it goes blank, you’ll know I’m dead. But Ethelred could survive for months on a bowl of rice and an organic muesli bar. He selected his clothes purely for their durability. It didn’t follow that lack of spending meant it was time to close the case.
Obviously, it was worth getting him back if at all possible, but there are no handbooks for recovering missing authors – no tips on the Internet. You don’t get ads in the local papers – missing dogs, yes; missing authors, no. It doesn’t seem to be something people want to do that much.
Then it struck me. He had not needed to use his credit card or cash card so far because he had access to cash from somewhere else. But sooner or later, in my experience, cash runs out. Then he would need plastic. If I waited until the relevant credit card statement came in, I would know where he had used it; but that only meant I could be certain where he was last month. On the other hand if I cancelled all his cards …
I can’t claim it was the work of a moment. Card companies tend to want to speak to the owner of the card, but if you convince them that you’ve just lost somebody’s card that they left with you, and you think the card and PIN number may have fallen into the hands of bad people with expensive tastes, then you can panic them into a bit of action. In twenty minutes Ethelred was, tragically, creditless.
I sat back to await another phone call.
It came within a fortnight.
In the interim I had been speculating on where Ethelred might be. The Loire valley was where he liked to spend his holidays, staying in hotels with peeling wallpaper, drinking obscure wines and confirming every Frenchman’s prejudice about the Englishman abroad. That, of course, was too obvious to be a real possibility. Clearly he was not in Bangalore. He disliked Benidorm, Corfu or anywhere else that attracted crowds of his fellow countrymen in large numbers. That left most of the rest of the world, which is big. I was still undecided, right up to the moment the call came.
It was nine in the evening when the tasteful novelty frog phone in my Hampstead flat started singing Greensleeves.
I silenced the frog in mid-verse by lifting the receiver. ‘Elsie Thirkettle,’ I said.
‘Did you cancel my cards?’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘I have no idea. I am not really interested in why you did it. I just asked: did you?’
‘You just cleared off and left me,’ I said, mustering some righteous indignation. ‘How was I to know whether you were supposed to be dead or alive? A phone call would have been good. Even a postcard would have been better than nothing.’
‘I phoned you two weeks ago.’
‘No, that was British Gas. Remember?’
There was, strangely, no reply to that.
‘Why couldn’t you just have the normal sort of mid-life crisis?’ I continued. ‘Why couldn’t you buy a Harley-Davidson, join a heavy-metal band, find religion? Why did it have to involve vanishing without trace? With Her?’
There was a long sigh. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘And now?’
‘And now I’d like my credit cards back. Please.’
‘Where are you exactly, Ethelred?’ I asked.
There was a pause. ‘Abroad,’ he said with more caution than was really called for.
‘In that case, this call must be costing you a bit,’ I said.
There was another pause. ‘I hadn’t really thought,’ he said.
‘Well, think now and get to the point.’
‘I need you to get my cards working again.’
‘Only you can do that.’
‘Great. Who do I phone?’
‘It’s not quite that simple,’ I said.
‘Not quite that simple?’
‘They need you to go into the bank in person to clear one or two things up.’
‘One or two things?’
‘Let’s say up to about six.’
‘Have you done something stupid?’
‘No,’ I said, but I was lying.
‘So what do I do now?’
‘If you ever want to use plastic again, you’ll need to come back to England.’
There was a long sigh. ‘Can you phone my hotel then and pay the bill with your own card so that I can leave?’
‘No.’
‘But …’ said the card-less person.
‘I’m not paying your bill so you can wander off with some floozy,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re hopeless with women. I’m coming to collect you. Where do I have to get a plane to?’
‘There are no more women in my life – and certainly no floozies. As for planes, you’ll need to come to Tours, I suppose, if you want to fly. But it’s probably easier to get the train. I’m in the Loire valley – to be exact I’m at the Vieille Auberge in Chaubord. It’s right opposite the chateau. You can’t miss it.’
‘Does it happen to have any peeling wallpaper?’
‘Yes. It’s the only sort of wallpaper it has.’
‘Does it smell of mildew and old cheese?’
‘Yes. Both.’
‘Is there anywhere else to stay?’
‘Quite possibly, but this is where I am staying. I like it.’
‘Then book me a room for tomorrow night,’ I said.
‘Just one night?’
‘I can’t see why we should need to stay longer,’ I said. I figured we needed to stay long enough for me to explain what I had done and for him to understand why it had been for his own good.
Of course, I had no way of knowing that, in a hotel full of stamp collectors, the guests would suddenly start murdering each other. It’s not the sort of thing you usually plan for, is it?
CHAPTER TWO
Ethelred met me at the station. He came dressed, for some reason, as the Englishman Abroad. He wore a crumpled linen suit, a crumpled stripy tie and a panama hat. It would have looked eccentric at any time but at a provincial railway station on a cold, rainy December afternoon it attracted many admiring glances.
‘Ethelred, you prat,’ I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him on the lower part of both cheeks. ‘Why are you wearing fancy dress?’
‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he said. ‘You cancelled my cards, remember?’
‘You must have other clothes. It’s been too cold for this sort of get-up for months.’
‘Not where I’ve been.’
‘Which was?’
‘I told you: India.’
‘You were actually working in a British Gas call centre in Bangalore?’
‘I may have made some of it up,’ he conceded, looking over the top of my head. (He’s just a fraction taller than I am.) ‘I was in fact in Goa when I phoned you,’ he added, as if that proved something.
‘Good for you,’ I said.
‘I have been to Bangalore,’ he added.
‘Do you have any idea just how little I care where you went with that tart?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Good. So when did you get here?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘A few days ago.’
‘Best get you back to Sussex then,’ I said.
He nodded meekly. ‘What I don’t understand, though,’ he said, ‘is why you keep telling me I’m dead. What exactly have you done, Elsie?’
I thought of the exploding plane and, for just a second, felt something that was a bit like remorse. I realised that sooner or later I was going to have to own up. I therefore drew myself up to my full height and said: ‘I don’t suppose you know where I could get some chocolate round here, do you?’
It was, after all, a genuine emergency. I’d forgotten to buy chocolate before leaving St Pancras, and after five hours’ travelling I was starting to get cold sweats, trembling hands and blurred vision.
‘There is in fact a chocolaterie in town,’ he said. ‘It’s called Apollinaire. I’m told it’s very good.’
‘I’ll drop my bag at the hotel first,’ I said. ‘Then guide me to Apollinaire.’
Ethelred took my bag, like the gent he is, and we set off on what he claimed was a short walk to the hotel. They had, however, put the town centre on the wrong side of the river from the railway station, and a cold wind was blowing down the Loire. Conversation was minimal until we had crossed the bridge.
‘Did you bring any English newspapers with you?’ he eventually asked, the perennial question of the Englishman abroad.
Actually they had given me one on Eurostar, but I’d dumped it in a bin at the Gare du Nord. Still, I was able to fill him in on the main stories that I thought a crime writer might appreciate.
‘There’s been a jewellery robbery in London,’ I said. ‘A big haul of diamonds. Then there was that company that was taken over by that other company – the Russian one? – well, the pension fund is in a complete mess and the pensioners have been left high and dry. I suppose that’s not really crime though? I mean, they’re allowed to do that, aren’t they?’
I paused. Ethelred just nodded vaguely, meaning either they were or they weren’t or that he couldn’t give a monkey’s.
‘Oh, yes,’ I went on. ‘There was another good crime story. Somebody is trying to blackmail this fizzy drink company. They say they’ve got the secret recipe for their cola and will publish it on the Internet if the company doesn’t pay up. Sorry – I forgot – you don’t know what the Internet is, do you?’
Ethelred shrugged again, showing that he did speak some French, and said: ‘Football results?’
‘Tottenham Wednesday beat Manchester something …’ I said. Or was that cricket? ‘Where is this hotel exactly?’
‘We’re almost there. You see those lights ahead of us. Right opposite the chateau. Any news on the literary front?’
‘Yes, your last novel was spoken of as a serious contender for the Booker Prize.’
‘Was it?’ he said, brightening up.
‘As if,’ I said. You’d think that writers would spot irony, wouldn’t you?
I racked my brains for anything else that might amuse him. ‘There was something on this ten-kroner puce they’ve discovered.’
That was an interesting story, in its way, and not without its own little ironies. It concerned a small pink piece of paper with tatty white perforations, originating in Denmark. Until recently there had been only one of these stamps in the world – sold in Denmark some time in the 1850s, when ten kroner would have been enough to post an elephant from Odense to Aarhus and back. They apparently never needed that many of them. Being the only such stamp surviving, it had been worth a bit more than ten kroner. The bad news for its owner was that a collector in Nykøbing had come across two more in his attic. The pink stamp had thus ceased to be part of that exclusive and highly prized club of single-known specimens. On the mere rumour of other stamps of a similar colour and price, its resale value had plummeted overnight – to a paltry million dollars or thereabouts. There were hints that the newly discovered stamps had to be fakes. This was only the beginning of the story, however, because the stamps had then vanished again. The owner had died and the family, who had always regarded Uncle Knud’s interest in philately as a bit of a waste of time and didn’t read the relevant magazines, decided to clear the house before selling it. It was only after Uncle Knud’s heirs had been contacted by a number of solicitous but very interested stamp dealers that they checked the will and remembered a couple of albums and several bags of assorted stamps that they had sold off at a flea market. They could not recall, offhand, whether two of the stamps had been pink, though they rather thought they might have been. The family were, as the saying goes, well gutted.
Conversely, somebody out there was probably quite pleased, since the stamps had gone for a mere five kroner per bag – scarcely enough to pay the postage on an ivory toothpick travelling from one side of Copenhagen to the other. There was speculation that, if the family discovered exactly who had them, they might try to recover them through the courts – though what their case was, other than their own stupidity, was not immediately apparent.
Strangely, this one did interest Ethelred in the sense that he let out another of his long sighs. ‘There’s been talk of nothing else at the hotel,’ he said.
Since we were not in Nykøbing, this was mildly surprising.
‘There’s a stamp fair going on at the chateau,’ he explained wearily. ‘Actually it finished today, but most of the people staying at the hotel since I arrived have been stamp collectors or stamp dealers. Occasionally they talk about stamps. At breakfast. At lunch. At dinner. In the lounge. In the bar. In the corridors. I fear for their souls.’
‘You can go to hell for talking about stamps?’ I asked.
‘I hope so,’ said Ethelred devoutly.
But the stamp people did not, in fact, only talk about stamps. In the hotel reception I met a nice Russian stamp collector, named Grigory Davidov. He was a little plumper than his doctor might have liked and more than a little pleased with himself – but he did have a very sound knowledge of chocolate.
‘Apollinaire!’ he said reverently, having overheard me talking to Ethelred. ‘Whatever you do, make sure you buy some of the peach truffles. They are divine.’ He did a sort of slobbery kissy thing with his fat fingers and his fat lips. I made a mental note to cut down a fraction on chocolate if I ever thought I might be putting on that sort of weight, though I reckon if you’re my build you can carry a few extra pounds without it showing.
‘Peach truffles?’ I repeated in reverential tones.
‘They are all good, naturally – the fondants, the violet creams, the champagne truffles – but I invariably select a peach truffle from the box first,’ he said. ‘The first chocolate from a full box is a sacred moment, do you not agree?’
I nodded. This is so true.
‘Of course, they are not so good for the figure,’ said Davidov with a throaty chuckle.
‘You look well on it,’ I lied.
‘With my build I can carry a few extra pounds without it showing,’ he said with a modest smile.
Call me stupid, but I only bought a small box of assorted truffles to begin with. I’d eaten half of them before I got back to the hotel. And they were indeed very, very good. Still, I could always get some more tomorrow before we checked out.
And call me a little over-focused on cocoa-based confectionery, but it was not until I had restored chocolate levels in my body that I remembered I had not answered Ethelred’s question. Why did I keep going on about his death? Yes, I would certainly need to explain.
But, the way I saw it, that could all wait for a bit. Anyway, plenty of authors were worth more dead than alive. It would be fine.
CHAPTER THREE
(Ethelred)
Elsie was right, as always.
If I was going to have a mid-life crisis, then it might as well have been a conventional one, and my choice of companion had been ill-advised. By the time I phoned Elsie for help I had been humiliated and abandoned. I am, of course, well used to humiliation; the only novelty was experiencing it in India. On reflection, I have to say that humiliation in India felt much the same as it had in Oxford, London and Sussex. It is certainly not worth going there for that purpose alone. Trust me on that.
And yet it had all started so well a year before.
With a single bound, or so it seemed to me, I was free. As a writer I have always tried to avoid the more obvious clichés, but that was how it felt as I scurried with my bags away from the short-term car park and towards the terminal building, leaving Elsie in my car, sleeping off the effects of a slightly drugged mug of drinking chocolate. I was free as a person, free as a writer. Elsie had for some time been telling me to get a life. I was simply following her instructions, as I had so many times before. She just hadn’t envisaged my drugging her so that I could make an unimpeded getaway.
What she did not know, moreover, was that I had been planning this for a while. My airline tickets were in my pocket. I had a wallet full of untraceable cash that would, with luck, keep me going for a while. I had left adequate instructions for the maintenance of my boiler. I was a free spirit at last.
As I glanced through one of the vast plate-glass windows on my way to the departure lounge, I saw that the sun was rising. It was rising only over Crawley, admittedly, but it symbolised other dawns in other places, whose names I could as yet only guess at.
‘Have a pleasant flight, sir,’ said the young lady as she handed me back my boarding pass.
‘You bet your ass, kid,’ I responded.
And for a while it was good. It really was. I (and my ‘floozy’ as Elsie insists on calling her) wandered barefoot along the dazzlingly white sand of a number of lonely beaches; we watched the burning sunset sky (and, just occasionally, the burning sunrise sky) over pink coral reefs; sometimes we lost ourselves in the contemplation of distant blue hills; sometimes we found strange, abandoned temples, half hidden in the deep shadows of banana groves on the edges of viridian paddy fields. One night we would sleep in creamy, silk sheets at the most expensive hotel in Singapore, an empty champagne bottle resting at the end of the four-poster bed; the next, we would be in a shack on the beach somewhere in Sumatra, with the soft tropical moonlight slanting in through the broken shutters onto our shared mat. Another time, we slept on faded red cushions on the deck of a dhow that we had hired by the day and ate chubby, rose-coloured fish which we had caught on lines and which we barbequed on bleached driftwood on a tiny, rocky island in the Indian Ocean. We ate excellent steak in a run-down eating-house in the red-light district of Jakarta, and casually exchanged views on the painted girls and their clients as they passed through. We travelled by mule along narrow paths and stayed some weeks in a monastery in a hidden valley in the Himalayas, where we woke every morning to tea laced with rancid butter and to the sight of a thin, clean wisp of cloud, streaming off the summit of Annapurna in the bright blue above us. We supplemented the cash I had brought with me with her own more extensive ill-gotten gains. Nothing was planned. Everything was done on a whim. Then, on a whim no doubt, one morning I found myself alone. She had gone and, it appeared, my remaining cash had elected to go with her. For the cash it was going to be a short life, but it would be a happy one.
I spent the day strolling barefoot along the beach to show myself that I could be a free spirit perfectly well on my own. Later I bought myself a pair of socks. That evening I decided that I had better check that all was well with my boiler in Sussex.
I had no wish to contact Elsie yet, but it seemed to me that if I phoned my old number and the phone was working then bills were being paid and all was probably well generally. If the phone had been cut off then Elsie had not forgiven me and it was time to fly home and sort out the frozen pipes.
I tried to work out the time difference between India and West Sussex. I had no wish to wake everyone in the block of flats with the phone ringing in the middle of the night. Unfortunately I miscalculated. Even more unfortunately – and quite inexplicably – it was Elsie who answered the phone.
‘Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ she said, in a manner that can be described only as proprietorial. What on earth was she doing there?
For a moment I was not sure what to say, and then I came up with a brilliant idea.
‘Is that the residence of Mr Ethelred Tressider?’ I asked in a cleverly assumed accent.
‘That was what I meant when I said it was Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ said a tired voice at the other end. ‘Who is that?’
‘I am sorry to trouble you, madam,’ I said. ‘It is British Gas. I just want to check if Mr Tressider’s thermostat is set at an appropriate temperature for the winter.’
‘Ethelred?’ she said. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’
This was obviously a lucky guess on Elsie’s part, but I was having none of it. I told her it was a complimentary safety check.
‘At midnight?’
Midnight? I checked my watch again and recalculated. So, Worthing was behind India then?
‘So sorry, memsahib,’ I said, slipping subtly into an Indian accent. ‘It is not midnight at the call centre. Please can you confirm Mr Tressider’s thermostat has been correctly adjusted for the winter?’
‘Ethelred, stop pissing about. The thermostat is just fine for a dead person’s flat. If you think you may not be dead, I’ll set it a notch or two higher. Now, you dim tart, where exactly are you?’
‘Dead?’ I said. This was news to me. What was Elsie playing at? My plan was to disappear and start a new life. Dying was never intended to be part of it. I wondered if I had misheard.
‘Ethelred, you dickhead,’ she said suddenly and inexplicably, ‘you realise this is entirely your fault?’
For a moment I almost forgot who I wasn’t, but recollected myself sufficiently to say: ‘All Mr Tressider’s fault?’ But I was still trying to work out what other words sounded like ‘dead’.
‘Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?’ Elsie was saying. ‘Where are you, Ethelred? I need to know … for certain reasons that I shall explain when I see you.’
‘Bangalore,’ I said. I’d been there recently.
‘That’s Bangalore, Cardiganshire?’
The game was clearly up, but that did not stop me blundering onwards. ‘I am not knowing what is Cardiganshire,’ I said.
‘Nos da,’ she said in a voice heavily laden with sarcasm.
‘Nos da,’ I replied stupidly.
And the phone went dead – a bit as I had myself, it would seem. It was clear that Elsie had done something idiotic, but what exactly? If she had had me legally declared dead, then my passport would have been cancelled, so that wasn’t what she meant. Whatever it was, it was clearly worse than that. But what was worse than that? I had no doubt I would find out soon enough.
I opened the bedroom window and listened for a while to the deafening trill of the cicadas. In the distance I heard the surf washing against the still-warm sand. The humid Indian night caressed my face and I breathed in a smell that was spices and drains in approximately equal measure. I had thought this was my future, but it was starting to look like my past. I closed the window again, switched the air-conditioning up to full blast and, tugging the sheet up over my head, tried to sleep.
A fortnight later I was in a reasonably priced hotel in the Loire valley and all of my credit cards had been cancelled.
As mid-life crises go, this one was turning out to be a bit of a disappointment.
CHAPTER FOUR
We were sitting in the hotel restaurant when Ethelred finished his account of his time in India and elsewhere. It sounded a bit rubbish. I blamed him mostly but (to be fair) I blamed Her mostly as well.
‘A postcard would have been nice,’ I reminded him. ‘Or didn’t it bother you that I might have thought you were dead?’
‘This thing about my being dead …’ he began.
Sooner or later I was going to have to face up to this one. Now wasn’t a bad time, but I felt sure there would be a better. Yes, indeed.
‘And in the meantime who was looking after your boiler?’ I demanded.
‘I am of course immensely grateful. Now about my death—’
‘Grateful? So you should be. You owe me for a full service, by the way.’
‘I assume the royalties are still coming in on my novels,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘You are still selling a few. It’s time you completed another one of your Inspector Fairfax novels. Your publisher is quite keen.’
Ethelred shook his head.
‘They were offering to increase your royalty on the first ten thousand by half a per cent.’
‘I’m not doing any more Fairfax,’ he said. ‘I thought I might try something new – a hard-boiled police procedural, set somewhere nobody has used yet.’
‘Not Edinburgh, then?’ I said.
‘Not Edinburgh. I thought maybe Brighton, and with a younger main character …’
‘And a taste for Mozart, no doubt.’
‘I thought Boccherini, perhaps,’ he said.
‘Not well enough known,’ I said.
‘He’s pretty well known.’
‘Not to your readers.’
‘Some of my loyal readers will have heard of him.’
‘Ethelred, neither of your loyal readers will have heard of him. Mozart’s safer. Trust me.’
Ethelred wasn’t too happy with this so I asked him (as you do) whether he was working on something at this moment.
‘I completed another manuscript just before I left,’ Ethelred said slightly sheepishly.
‘Did you?’ I asked. I don’t think my face showed any trace of guilt.
It doesn’t usually.
‘I assumed you would have found it and read it,’ Ethelred continued.
‘Did you?’ I asked. (See note above on guilt.)
