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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: The Herring Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
When literary agent Elsie Thirkettle is invited to accompany tall but obscure crime-writer Ethelred Tressider to dinner at Muntham Court, she is looking forward to sneering at his posh friends. What she is not expecting is that, half way through the evening, her host will be found strangled in his locked study. Since there is no way that a murderer could have escaped, the police conclude that Sir Robert Muntham has killed himself. A distraught Lady Muntham, however, asks Ethelred to conduct his own investigation. Ethelred (ably hindered by Elsie) sets out to resolve a classic 'locked room' mystery; but is any one of the assorted guests and witnesses actually telling the truth? And can Ethelred's account be trusted?
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Seitenzahl: 339
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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The Herring in the Library
L. C. TYLER
To Ann
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The site of Muntham Court is now occupied by Worthing Crematorium, developers having formed a view of it that was closer to Elsie’s than to Ethelred’s. The Muntham Court I describe in this book is not, however, very different from the one that existed until the middle part of the last century. If it still stood, it would probably be owned by somebody much like Sir Robert Muntham. All characters in this book are, however, completely fictional. I now accept, on Elsie’s assurance, that Miss Scarlett was in no way to blame for the murder of Dr Black and unreservedly apologise for, and completely withdraw, any remarks that I may have made to the contrary.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
John Keats,
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’
CHAPTER ONE
There is nothing more tiresome, when you are about to expose a murderer, than to discover that you have been wilfully misled by the one person that you had thought you could trust.
Elsie had, since mid-afternoon, been cheating at Cluedo, at first subtly but now with little or no pretence of following the same rules that I was.
‘If,’ I said, ‘you really do have Miss Scarlett’s card in your hand, then remarkably nobody has committed a murder and Dr Black has died in the library of natural causes.’
Elsie, immune since birth to irony, simply nodded at this self-evident truth. ‘That seems reasonable to me. Natural causes in the library. That also means I win.’ She picked up my piece (Colonel Mustard) and flicked him back into the box, where he spun for a moment before coming to rest in sad and friendless isolation. The other five pieces, all now happily cleared of any suspicion of guilt, were allowed to remain in their various locations on the board.
The game was clearly over, but there were one or two minor issues I still needed to clear up. ‘Ignoring for a moment the impossibility of that outcome, why do you win, when I said it first?’
‘You said it ironically. I said it in earnest,’ said Elsie.
Long experience has taught me that the more ridiculous an assertion is, the more difficult it is to argue against it. Unwisely, I persisted.
‘You win only if that’s what the cards say,’ I said, with impeccable male logic. Though I was confident that the cards could not say that, I immediately regretted my generosity in conceding even this much. Elsie could do a great deal with a very small concession.
Her plump hand was already on the envelope in the middle of the board that concealed the three murder cards. She peeked a little too quickly and put them back. ‘Yes,’ she confirmed, as if I might really be stupid enough to believe it. ‘Natural causes. You lose.’
‘Except Miss Scarlett is in fact the murderer, isn’t she?’ I said. ‘So when I asked you whether you had Miss Scarlett and you said you had, you were basically lying, weren’t you?’
Elsie assumed a look of wide-eyed innocence, to which she was not even remotely entitled.
‘I am Miss Scarlett,’ she said, as if explaining something that should have been obvious even to me. ‘Look, there’s my piece, in the library, where you put it.’
‘You have to have the card in order to deny Miss Scarlett is the killer,’ I said.
‘Not if you are Miss Scarlett. You could hardly expect Miss Scarlett to admit to the murder and then continue to flounce around the board for the rest of the game as if nothing had happened. Obviously she would deny it right up to the last. It’s in the rules.’
I wondered if there was a way of continuing the discussion that wouldn’t make me sound silly and pedantic. Probably not. One of Elsie’s roles as my literary agent was, I had learnt long ago, to remind me of my many inadequacies. We had established two or three new ones that afternoon. I doubted there could be any more to discover, but it seemed wiser not to take chances. Best, then, simply to agree with her that the Fifth Amendment applied to Cluedo, and no character could be required to incriminate himself or herself. In any case, I badly needed her to answer a question that I had asked shortly before.
‘Yes, Ethelred,’ she said when I reminded her. ‘I was listening to every word.’
‘And what was I saying?’ I enquired.
To be fair to her, she didn’t look embarrassed. She simply busied herself switching the cards in the envelope, neatly fitting up the absent Colonel Mustard as the murderer (with the dagger in the kitchen). ‘You were telling me that Amazon rankings are a plot by the Freemasons, the Jesuits and Dan Brown, and are based not on actual sales but on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid at Giza.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then you were probably complaining about the multi-squillion-pound advance to that supermodel for her so-called novel. Actually, I know the agent who negotiated the deal and the advance was scarcely more than your lifetime earnings. And at least ten per cent will have gone to the ghostwriter who really produced it. So, nothing to get excited about there.’
‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Have you actually listened to anything I have said for the past half hour?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Though, come to think of it, I do remember you unjustly accusing my piece of murder. I’m not sure I have forgiven you for that. In any case, writers really only have three subjects of conversation, two of which I have covered. So, it has to be the third one, whatever that is.’
‘I was asking you, as my agent, for some advice on my next novel. It’s what you get your fifteen per cent for.’
‘Ethelred, one hundred per cent would not compensate for having to listen to you rabbiting on. I get my fifteen per cent for selling your books to unsuspecting publishers. My advice has to be free of charge – you couldn’t afford it at market value.’
‘If I can’t work this out, there’ll be nothing to deduct fifteen per cent from.’
‘So third possible topic of conversation – all genre fiction is sadly underrated by critics and the public, and you want to embark on a great literary novel,’ she said, showing she might have been listening in on the conversation after all.
‘But whenever I sit down at the keyboard, I just get nowhere.’
‘Look,’ said Elsie, patiently, ‘you are a second-rate crime writer.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ said Elsie, equally patiently, ‘you are a third-rate crime writer, occasionally aspiring to the second-rate. Your fingers are used to typing out straightforward plots – basic characterisation, sound accounts of police procedures, accurate descriptions of pubs and dimly lit back alleys – no unreliable narrators, no flashbacks or anything else that might cause confusion for the sort of person who reads your books. Ask your fingers to produce something swanky and obviously they get worried. They start to question whether this is wise. They’re good intelligent fingers, those are.’
‘I’d hoped for some sensible advice,’ I said in clarification.
‘Well, why didn’t you say so? My sensible advice is as follows. Don’t confuse your loyal readers by doing something different. You’ll piss them off.’
‘Are you saying that crime-fiction fans are incapable of appreciating good literature?’
‘I’m not talking about all crime-fiction fans,’ said Elsie. ‘I’m just talking about … well, never mind.’ She patted my hand across the Cluedo board. ‘It’s time you wrote another Master Thomas. If you leave it too long between books, people will stop buying them. Don’t forget your readers aren’t as young as they used to be. You need to get another book out there while they can still remember your name or indeed their own names. Have you checked your Amazon rankings lately?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ I said.
‘If I were you, I’d get down to another historical detective story this evening. After all, there’s no time like the present.’
This made me look at my watch.
‘You know as well as I do – we’re due at Muntham Court in an hour. We’d better get changed.’
‘Changed?’ asked Elsie.
‘Clothes,’ I said.
Elsie pointed to what she was wearing. This summer she had gone a bit peasant for no obvious reason. I’d seen one or two actresses photographed in something similar for the Sunday colour supplements, but they had known roughly where to stop. Elsie’s costume was sort of Gypsy Rose Lee meets Vivienne Westwood – though it didn’t look as if they had been pleased to see each other. I’d hoped she had something else in the small bag she had deposited in the hallway of my flat. I was still hoping.
‘Look, clothes,’ she said. ‘I am already wearing clothes. I accept that you probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d shown up naked, but I flatter myself others might.’
‘Didn’t you bring anything else?’
‘Such as? It’s just dinner with your mates in their flat,’ said Elsie.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You said: they live on an estate.’
‘They own an estate,’ I said. ‘Muntham Court.’
‘Muntham Court? Still sounds a bit Local Authority to me,’ said Elsie.
‘Sir Robert and Lady Muntham,’ I said, ‘of Muntham Court, in the county of West Sussex. That’s who we are having dinner with.’
‘And who else is on the guest list?’ she asked. ‘Lord Snooty and Bertie sodding Wooster?’
‘Just a few friends,’ I said.
‘For whom I apparently have to dress up?’
‘Black tie,’ I said.
‘You can go on your own.’
‘That would mean you d miss an opportunity to sneer at my friends,’ I said.
‘Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘I’m sure they won’t mind you as you are. I promise I won’t tell them you’re dressed like that because you thought they lived in a council flat.’
‘No, I can tell them that myself,’ said Elsie. ‘Right. I’ve got time for a nice relaxing bath before I reapply my lipstick, and you’ve got time to write the first five hundred words of the next Master Thomas. Nothing swanky. Keep it simple. No metafiction. No foreshadowing of events via dubious analogies. And no flashbacks.’
CHAPTER TWO
It must have been almost three months before that when I had run into Rob Muntham coming out of the village post office. I had literally bumped into a tall, slightly stooped, grey-haired figure, who was attempting to enter as I attempted to leave. I was just framing a muttered apology when the man addressed me.
‘Ethelred?’ he said.
I must have looked blank because he repeated himself.
‘Ethelred Tressider, isn’t it? You don’t recognise me, do you? I’m Robert Muntham.’
‘Rob Muntham?’ I said. I had a horrible feeling that I had sounded as though I was correcting him on the subject of his own name, but at university he had never been called ‘Robert’ – he had been ‘Rob’ or, more usually, ‘Shagger’. The new, fuller version of his name seemed to come with the gravitas that he had acquired from somewhere during the thirty-odd years since I had last seen him. And, thinking about it, he had also sobered up a bit since that last occasion, standing in the middle of the quad singing a song apparently addressed to a Zulu warrior.
He gave me a tight-lipped smile in response to my mode of address. ‘These days I am, for my sins, Sir Robert Muntham.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Congratulations. I read about it in the college magazine.’
‘For services to banking,’ he added.
‘Ah, yes,’ I said again. I wondered if he had really been given a knighthood for his sins. It seemed unlikely, even for a banker. Still, Sir Robert Muntham …
It’s strange how some of one’s contemporaries show wholly illusory promise, while others emerge unreasonably and gloriously triumphant. Shagger Muntham was unquestionably in the latter category. He captained the college rugby team and had narrowly missed a boxing blue. His capacity for beer qualified him as some sort of minor alcoholic deity. He knew all of the words to ‘Eskimo Nell’ and most of the words to ‘The Harlot of Jerusalem’. These things were held, in the college, to be much to his credit. On the other hand, even his closest friends never claimed to know what subject he was reading. He was the only person I can recall being wildly congratulated on achieving a third-class degree. The party lasted several days and ended with him standing in the quad … No, I think I’ve mentioned that already.
Then, for a while, we heard nothing of him at all. Only later did his apotheosis become apparent. He had descended on the City when the main academic requirements were a pair of red braces and brash confidence. One he had already. The other he had bought, presumably, at a tailor’s in Docklands. As time went by, we sometimes caught a brief mention of him in the national press. The college newsletter increasingly called upon him for short articles on life after university or to encourage us to give generously to some appeal for a new boathouse or scholarships for overseas students – each successive accompanying photograph showed him slightly plumper, slightly greyer, distinctly more pleased with himself. The articles on life after university at least showed no false modesty. If the Queen had been hoping to surprise Shagger, she would have needed to give him a lot more than a knighthood.
‘Congratulations,’ I said again. Then I added: ‘Oddly enough, I get reminded of you quite often round here. There’s a big house nearby called—’
‘—Muntham Court,’ he said.
‘You know it?’
‘Know it, seen it, bought it.’
‘That’s a—’
‘—coincidence? Not really. The missus rather fancied being Lady Muntham of Muntham Court. So I got it to oblige. We’ll keep the house in Chelsea too.’
‘As one does,’ I said.
‘Yes, Ethelred,’ he said, without his lip even inching towards a grin. ‘As one does.’
I switched off the smile and tried to think who Lady Muntham might be. Could he still be with the girl he was going out with at university? ‘So, you married Harriet?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘Clever of you to remember. But she’s not Lady Muntham. God forbid. Harriet and I parted company a while back. I later married Annabelle en secondes noces, as they say. I’m not sure which was more expensive: the divorce or the celebrity wedding that Annabelle wanted.’
‘A cheap divorce then,’ I said. But Shagger failed to find this amusing either.
‘No, Ethelred,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a cheap divorce.’
His attention seemed to be focused for a moment on some distant object. Then, turning back to me, he said: ‘Didn’t you marry Geraldine? She was at that secretarial college.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But we also got divorced. It happens. She later went and lived with Rupert Mackinnon. You remember Rupert?’ Rupert too had been a contemporary at college.
Shagger nodded. ‘She got around a bit, your Geraldine,’ he said. ‘Still, I’m sure you discovered that.’
I shook my head. Other than her getting into bed with my former best friend – the sort of slip-up anyone might make – I had no reason to doubt Geraldine’s fidelity.
‘Got around? No, it was just Rupert,’ I said.
Shagger’s mouth started to form a lopsided smirk, as if I was attempting to be funny, but then a large green Jaguar drove past us doing about fifteen miles an hour. His face fell instantly. The car hesitated briefly at the crossroads before turning right at the Gun. The driver appeared to flash a quick glance in our direction, then the Jaguar shot forward. We heard it proceeding, rapidly but now out of sight, up School Hill and back towards the roundabout.
Shagger scowled after it. I assumed that, like many people these days, he disapproved of large, polluting cars.
‘He looked lost,’ I said.
‘No, he knows exactly where he’s going,’ said Shagger.
I, in turn, started a polite smile to acknowledge what I assumed was an obscure joke on Shagger’s part, but whatever he had meant by it, it was not a pleasantry. My grin faded without it having been registered, still less returned. Shagger seemed to be listening to the fading noise of the engine as the climate criminal progressed onto the ring road, merging with the late-afternoon traffic.
His momentary preoccupation at least gave me a chance to take in this man I had not seen for so many years – or at least, not in the flesh. Thinking back to the last photograph I had seen of him, though, I realised he had lost a little weight. The glossy self-satisfaction that had dissuaded me, and probably many others, from contributing to whichever good cause he happened to be promoting was less evident. And there was grey around his eyes, I noticed, as well as in his hair. Still, he looked prosperous enough. The tweed jacket was well cut, new and in all likelihood from Savile Row. The trousers were pressed to a military perfection. His brown brogues shone like old mahogany. He carried his tweed cap well for somebody who came from a generation that had largely abandoned head-gear of any sort. One might have said that he was attempting to caricature the dress of the local squire if it were not for the fact that he had just become the local squire. My local squire. I wondered whether I could risk inviting a man with the biggest house in the village and a few million pounds worth of real estate in Chelsea back to my own modest flat. Possibly not.
‘So, do you live round here?’ he asked.
I indicated Greypoint House on the opposite side of the irregular, though rather pretty, square that forms the centre of our village. Two ancient pubs, a post office, a quaint supermarket, a butcher’s shop, an ex-farmhouse of uncertain age and my own humble residence, all masking the sea of comfortable modern bungalows that now makes up most of Findon. Shagger acknowledged it with a nod. ‘Not a bad little place,’ he said, taking in the grey, double-fronted Georgian facade, its bay windows, its lilac tree and its low flint garden wall. ‘Writing is obviously reasonably profitable then?’
‘My bit of it is those two windows up there,’ I said. ‘It’s all flats now.’
‘Such a shame,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t really be allowed to mess around with old houses like that.’
The last distant notes of the Jaguar’s engine had long since faded away. I was about to touch my forelock and take my leave when Shagger suddenly said: ‘Well, behind that bay window must be a very pleasant sitting room, and behind that sitting room there must be a well-stocked kitchen with a kettle and a jar of coffee. I suppose you’ve no plans to invite me back?’
Briefly I felt like Mole being addressed, and slightly patronised, by Ratty. I tried to remember whether I’d left a bucket of whitewash in the hallway … or was that Badger?
‘Yes, do come back for a coffee,’ I said. ‘If you’ve nothing better to do.’
‘What could I have better to do than have coffee with an old chum? Lead on, Macduff,’ he said.
I wondered whether to correct his Shakespearean quotation, but, concluding that Shagger might not yet have heard of Shakespeare, I simply indicated the way. Shagger strode ahead, his hands behind his back, the well-loved squire walking at a measured pace and in very shiny shoes through his new village.
That was the first of a number of such meetings. Our relations with people often fall into patterns that are almost unique to them, without seeming in any way out of the ordinary. In Robert’s case (I quickly ceased to think of him as ‘Shagger’) the pattern proved to be that he would drop in without warning, whenever he ventured into the village for a newspaper or some other minor purchase. He expected me to be at home, as indeed I usually was – we third-rate writers don’t get out that much. Robert and I would have coffee and he would talk about our time at university or his time in the City. I was occasionally allowed to contribute to his narrative – for example to remind him how narrowly and unfairly he had missed a boxing blue or to tease him gently about his success with women or capacity for drinking beer. I often envied his gift of partial recall. Once when talking about academic matters he mentioned in passing that it was a shame he had missed getting a first – that he had also missed getting a second apparently troubled him less.
He would ask occasionally about my books, but was always satisfied with the briefest of answers. Often they were the same answers I had given him the previous week. We rarely trespassed very far into the present. Even the past seemed to stop short at the day he had left the bank.
‘It was time to go, Ethelred,’ he said, one day when our conversation had fleetingly edged up to that point and then backed abruptly away. ‘You have to know when it’s time to go. No point in lingering.’ And the conversation had reverted to a rugby match against Teddy Hall in which Robert had (he reminded me) played a starring role.
But why it had been time to go and what would have happened had he lingered were topics that were always skilfully sidestepped.
‘You’re lucky to have this little place,’ he said more than once. ‘Everything you want to hand. No gardens requiring continuous maintenance by expensive staff. No dry rot hiding in the cellar. Just a snug little bolthole.’
‘Bolthole from what, Robert?’ I asked. ‘This is what I have. This is it.’
‘Capital little place, all the same,’ he said, taking in most of the flat in a single glance.
Again, I felt I was being patronised, but perhaps justifiably so. I could, as Elsie had tactfully pointed out, scarcely claim even to be a second-rate crime writer. I had a bank balance that was entirely appropriate to my literary status. Robert had, for a time, run one of the biggest financial institutions in the City. He could afford to retire – grey-haired and with the beginnings of a stoop perhaps, but still a relatively young man. He was Sir Robert Muntham KCBE of Muntham Court. I wasn’t.
Part of the pattern too was that his wife did not join him on these visits. It was several weeks before I met her. Annabelle proved to be some years younger than he was – an elegant and rather tense woman, who (I was later told) had had a reasonably successful career as a model before settling down and not having children. I’m not sure our first meeting was a success.
‘This is Ethelred, one of my very oldest chums,’ Robert had said, when the three of us happened to coincide outside the post office one morning.
‘You live here – in Findon?’ she asked, suggesting that Robert had not mentioned his chum much, if at all, on his return with The Times or a tube of toothpaste.
‘I have a flat over there,’ I said, anxious to avoid any repetition of the error that Robert had fallen into. ‘It’s just a couple of rooms up on the first floor.’
She looked from me to the flat and then back again. ‘That must be very …’ she said. But she was unable to come up with any advantages to living in a small flat just outside Worthing. ‘So, what do you do, Alfred?’ she asked.
‘Ethelred,’ I said. ‘As for what I do, I am a writer.’
‘I thought you said “Ethelred”, but then I decided I must have misheard. Do you write under your own name – no, surely not?’
I told her the three names that I wrote under.
‘I don’t think I’ve read any of your books,’ she said. It’s a response I’m used to. Really, it doesn’t bother me any more. ‘What do you write?’ she added.
‘Crime mainly – as J. R. Elliot and Peter Fielding anyway. When I’m being Amanda Collins I write romantic fiction.’
She shook her head. She hadn’t heard of any of me. ‘So, do you write hard-boiled crime?’
‘Not really. My victims die almost painlessly and usually with the minimum of blood to clean up afterwards.’
‘Is that realistic?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, I must read one of your books anyway. Which do you recommend?’
I named a couple at random. Other than that the J. R. Elliot books are set in the fourteenth century and the Peter Fielding books in the present day, they’re all much of a muchness.
‘I hope you remember those titles, Robert,’ she said to her husband.
Robert winked at me before saying: ‘Of course, dearest.’
At that point Lady Muntham recalled that she needed to get some steak from the butcher but, before she set out on the fifty yards or so of road that separated us from Peckham’s, she added: ‘You must come and have dinner with us, Ethelred.’
I acknowledged, with a thin smile, a promise that I did not expect would ever be honoured. Then, a couple of weeks later a gilt-edged card arrived. When I next saw Robert, I apologised for the fact that I had invited my agent down to stay that weekend and so would be unable to attend.
Which was how I ended up sitting in my flat with Elsie discussing evening wear.
‘Come on, Tressider,’ she said. ‘Or we’re going to be late for Lord Snooty and his pals. I don’t know what you were thinking about but you were miles away there. You’ve got to do five hundred words before dinner. No flashbacks.’
‘I always end up writing flashbacks,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of writer I am.’
AT MUNTHAM COURT
‘Come closer to the fire, Master Thomas.’
‘The fire? Thank you, my lady. You are kind. Very kind. Too kind.’
Yes, decidedly, just that little bit too kind, thought Master Thomas, inching closer as instructed, but no further than politeness dictated. The heat from this blaze was uncomfortable, even in January. Nevertheless, he rubbed his small, soft hands in front of it. Well-seasoned logs from the estate had had the snow dusted from them and had been piled by liveried serving men into the vast stone fireplace. The flames now leapt upwards into the cavernous, soot-crusted chimney, seemingly as eager to please Her Ladyship as everyone else who came in contact with her.
Clever things, these chimneys. Thomas, like most people, had grown up in a house where smoke escaped through a blackened hole in the roof, to the extent that it escaped at all. Now everyone was building houses with chimneys. That was modern times for you. And who knew what wonders the fifteenth century might bring?
‘Sharing the fire with you makes it no less warm for me,’said the lady. ‘And you have had a long and cold journey from London.’
‘The radiance of your welcome warmed me the moment I stepped across your threshold, my lady. No fire needed. None at all. Not a single log. Scarcely even a twig.’
‘Are you a flatterer, Master Thomas, because you are a poet or because you are a courtier?’
The problem, thought Master Thomas, was that he was unable to have a conversation with this lady without babbling like an inhabitant of the Bethlehem Hospital. Still, it was a good question: poet or courtier? Both would be better than the day job.
‘I am a poor poet, Your Ladyship, and no courtier. I am just a humble customs officer, as Your Ladyship knows. And words that would acknowledge the name of flattery are clearly no flattery at all. So if I confess to being a flatterer, I am none.’
‘But you are more than a humble customs officer if the King entrusts you with important messages for my husband.’ Thomas looked up from his contemplation of the fire and his calculation as to what it would cost to install a modest chimneypiece in his own small house at Blackfriars.
‘Your husband thinks not. He wondered that the King had troubled me with a message of such insignificance.’
‘I am sure that the King would not waste his servants’ time.’
‘That shows how little you know of kings, Your Ladyship, if you would pardon me for pointing out your good fortune. But your husband raised the same point. Hethought that there must be more to it. He enquired whether the message might perhaps be in code.’
‘And was it?’
‘I can tell Your Ladyship no more than I could tell Sir Edmund. Messages in code are to be understood by the sender and the receiver. I am neither. I am merely a—’
‘—humble clerk. Yes, I think you’ve said that already.’
‘Humble customs officer, was what I was planning to say. Formerly apprentice to an apothecary. But “clerk” if you will. It is as Your Ladyship wishes.’
‘And what did the message say?’
‘I gave it to your husband sealed, just as it left the King.’
‘The King had sealed it himself?’
‘It bore the King’s personal seal. The Signet.’
‘And how does my husband intend to reply?’
‘Sir Edmund will inform me when he returns from hunting,’ said Thomas. ‘I am to wait. I must confess that I had hoped he would return much earlier. I fear that the light is now fading. These January days are short.’
‘You will stay the night, Master Thomas, and set out for London in the morning. A place can be found for you to sleep. You will be more comfortable here than in some miserable inn on the London road. However soon my husband returns, there is no question of your going anywhere this evening. I must in any case think of a suitable response to your other missive.’
‘The poem from my master?’
‘Indeed. Master Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem.’
‘I believe no reply is expected.’
‘But of course a poem must be replied to! You know little of chivalry, Master Thomas.’
‘That is true, my lady. Though I read romances avidly when I was young.’
‘Arthur and Guinevere?’
‘Roland and Charlemagne. Whatever I could get my hands on.’
‘And did you dream of being a knight? Did you dream of carrying a sword?’
‘My dagger is sword enough,’ said Thomas, patting the ballock knife that hung from his belt. ‘I am not entirely certain that I would know how to use it in a fight, but it would be unwise to travel the roads with no visible means of defence. A fly may be swatted with impunity, but the smallest wasp is accorded some respect. In any case, the dagger is useful for cutting up sausages.’
‘You would use your Excalibur for cutting up sausages? Fie! I think those romances were wasted on you,’ smiled the lady.
‘I tell the stories to my children at bedtime,’ said Thomas. ‘Sometimes I do make Arthur cut up sausages with Excalibur. It is a fault with all my stories that I will sacrifice both character and plot to amuse my audience.’
The lady frowned. ‘You have children? And a wife? But then …’
‘I have a wife to whom I am devoted and three children, to whom we are both devoted in equal measure – Richard, Geoffrey and little Blanche. Blanche is the youngest – she is just walking. You appear perplexed, my lady. It is entirely natural that a man of my age would have a family.’
‘No, of course. It was just … they must miss you when you are away.’ The lady gave a tight-lipped smile. Thomas instinctively looked over his shoulder towards the door, then wondered why he had done it. The lady seemed ill at ease for no apparent reason. Perhaps she did not like children? There were no children in the house. If she were unable to bear children herself, it might be distasteful to her to discuss the children of others? But surely she herself had raised the subject?
‘I am often away on the King’s business,’ said Thomas, breaking the silence. ‘The children are used to it. I have promised them a new story when I return. As I ride, I make up stories. It passes the time. It was a long journey down to Sussex, so I have thought of two so far.’
‘Indeed,’ said the lady, ‘you must tell them to your children if … when you return.’
‘I shall do so,’ said Thomas.
The conversation lapsed inexplicably. The lady twisted the bunch of keys tied to her kirtle.
‘They should not have sent you,’ she exclaimed with a sudden determination. ‘Not you. It was wrong of them. Perhaps indeed you should go now. I think that would be best.’
‘I fear,’ said Thomas with a shrug, ‘that it is already too late. I am, as it were, here. I shall have to accept your kind hospitality. I hope, my lady, that you would not throw me out into the snow merely because I have three children and place mirth before gallantry. But I must in any case wait for Sir Edmund. Those are my instructions.’ He gave a slight bow. She did not smile in response.
‘Yes, too late …’ she repeated, though not to Master Thomas.
There was another pause, during which the fire crackled and spat. A dog sleeping close to the hearth opened one eye, rolled over and stretched out its legs. Then the thing that they seemed to have been waiting for happened.
The outer door to the great hall was flung open and three men strode into the room bringing winter with them. Thomas felt the bitter rush of cold air and noticed white specks on their cloaks – specks that were fading one by one as he watched, leaving small damp patches. It must be snowing again outside, he thought. Perhaps they were three of Sir Edmund’s men who had ridden on ahead to announce his arrival. They certainly seemed to think they belonged here. He turned to the lady as if hoping for some sort of introduction, but she stood mute and staring in their direction. She wanted desperately to say something, but seemed to be waiting for a cue.
The tallest of the three, a man with grizzled hair and a short beard, advanced until he was just a yard or so away from the lady. He carried a quiet authority – not one of Sir Edmund’s men, then, but a knight himself, perhaps, with his own retainers.
‘Lady Catherine …’ he began.
‘You bear bad news?’ she gasped.
‘I bear … yes, the news is bad. It is the worst. Please prepare yourself …’
‘My husband …’
‘Sir Edmund is dead,’ said the man very quickly. ‘He was …’
‘By whom?’ gasped Lady Catherine. Then, seeing theexpression on the man’s face, she suddenly fell silent.
‘He was stabbed with a dagger,’ the man continued very slowly and precisely. ‘By an unknown assailant.’
‘Who escaped …’
‘Indeed … as you say … who escaped. But we have a description. A short man, with the appearance of a clerk, carrying a dagger and speaking in the manner of one from London.’
The three men and the lady turned as one to look at Thomas. The dog (who clearly knew whose side he was on) growled softly.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Thomas, ‘that I haven’t seen any other clerks from London near here.’
‘Nor have I,’ said the man. He turned to his two companions. ‘Arrest this clerk,’ he said.
Thomas blinked a couple of times. No, they were all still there. This was still happening. ‘To what end?’ he asked, as well as his dry mouth would allow.
‘We think you may be able to help us with our enquiries.’
‘About the stabbing? I met Sir Edmund only briefly. He was alive when I last saw him.’
‘So you say.’
‘I assure you that there’s nothing I can remember that would be of any assistance to you gentlemen …’
‘Perhaps we can jog your memory then,’ said the man.
‘I can’t quite see how you would be able to do that.’
‘Ever been tortured before?’ asked the man.
‘No,’ said Thomas.
‘Well, now’s your chance.’
I reread what I had just written. I rarely begin a novel at chapter one and work methodically through a manuscript. Often I will write the ending quite early on and progress steadily towards it. Here I had obviously begun halfway through. I was not yet sure why Master Thomas had been dispatched to Sussex. Clearly he had been sent by his master, Geoffrey Chaucer, and clearly he had been dumped right in it. But why? And why had I chosen to set it at Muntham Court? Lady Catherine knew a great deal more than she had let on. Was she complicit in her husband’s murder? If so, was she the instigator or somebody else’s pawn …?
‘Come on, Tressider, I said five hundred words, not half a novel,’ said Elsie, looking round the door.
‘It’s only one thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one words – hardly half a novel even by my standards.’
‘Whatever. Just save it and close the lid. The sooner we go to your snooty friends, the sooner we can piss off back home. I like the neck wear, by the way – I’ve never seen a bow tie at that angle before. Original.’
I closed the lid of my laptop as instructed and furtively straightened my tie.
‘I’ll get the car keys,’ I said.
CHAPTER THREE
Elsie had insisted that we drive.
‘It’s scarcely a ten-minute walk,’ I’d pointed out, ‘and it’s a lovely summer evening.’
‘I’m not walking up some muddy lane in high heels, thank you very much. You’ve been away from London too long, Tressider. You think mud is fine if it doesn’t reach to the tops of your Hunters. We have something called pavements in London. Once you have them fitted in Sussex we’ll walk as much as you like. Until then you get to drive me.’
Elsie discovered she had in fact left in my flat (to which she is a frequent visitor) something in black silk that would pass as an evening dress and that she imagined suited her short but well-rounded figure. She had also at some point in the past left a pair of black high-heeled shoes in my care. The heels increased her height by many inches, but not by enough of them to quite carry off the black silk item, which had been abandoned with me for good reason. I wondered whether to suggest she went as a Transylvanian fishwife after all, but decided not. Long experience had taught me just to tell Elsie that she looked great and to keep my fingers crossed for next time.
So, the wheels of my Mini crunched up the gravel drive, now in deep shadow from the two rows of ancient trees that flanked it, and performed a spacious arc in front of Muntham Court. I applied the brake and went round to open Elsie’s door.
