Crooked Herring (11 page)

She was looking at me oddly, as well she might. Perhaps Elsie was right. There had been no reason at all for me to visit Emma. She had told me nothing that she wouldn’t have told me on the phone. I had only succeeded in making Emma think I was slightly weird. There was little doubt that, the more she thought about my two visits, the more inexplicable they would become in the context of normal human behaviour. And all for nothing.

‘Just one other thing,’ I said as I gathered the three volumes together. ‘Why did you suspect Crispin was seeing somebody else?’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ she said. ‘Henry Holiday phoned me up and told me.’

‘I’m not interrupting anything?’

‘No,’ said Elsie.

‘It isn’t biscuit time?’

‘Not quite, but thank you for the reminder. You have my full attention.’

‘I’ve just got back from Brighton.’

‘But that’s
much
too early. It’s scarcely seven minutes to biscuit time.’

‘I know what time it is.’

‘If you’re going to spend the night with somebody you have to stay where you are. You can’t just keep bouncing backwards and forwards across Sussex.’

‘I’m not going to spend the night with anyone.’

‘Did you make a clumsy and ineffective pass at her, after which she told you to piss off back where you came from?’

‘That has nothing to do with you.’

‘I thought so. Well, it’s clearly too late to phone for my advice now.’

‘That’s not what I want your advice on. Emma Vynall had a row with her husband after she’d been tipped off he was having a relationship with somebody.’

‘Crispin was always having a relationship with somebody.’

‘Yes, but guess who the tip-off came from?’

‘Her best friend?’

‘Henry Holiday.’

‘Henry didn’t think to mention that to you?’

‘No.’

‘Of course, he may not be proud of snitching on Crispin.’

‘No.’

‘But didn’t you say that Emma hardly knew Henry?’

‘She said she’d talked to him once or twice.’

‘Well, if one of those occasions was when he phoned her with the glad tidings …’

‘His act of kindness wasn’t inspired by his close friendship with Emma Vynall.’

‘In which case,’ said Elsie, ‘he must have hated Crispin Vynall’s guts big time.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Or Emma’s lying,’ said Elsie. ‘Maybe there’s something between Emma and Henry.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘She said she hardly knew him.’

‘Ethelred,’ said Elsie. ‘Basic lesson in human nature for you. It is perfectly possible for a beautiful woman with access to blonde hair dye to tell the occasional fib. You
may find it difficult to believe, but it happens. Think back to your first wife.’

‘My only wife,’ I said.

‘That’s true. Why do I think of you as having a string of failed marriages?’

I wondered if I should explain to Elsie that I did not regard my marriage to Geraldine as a complete failure and that we had both enjoyed several happy years together. It was true that she had never shared my interest in crime fiction and I had never shared her interest in shagging my best friend, but in other respects we were as compatible as most couples are. But Elsie’s agile mind had moved on.

‘OK, let’s go with your theory that blondes never lie. That means that Henry hated Crispin? Why? Could Crispin have been slagging him off on the Internet, not as Thrillseeker but under some other
nom de sockpuppet
?’

‘Possibly. But you still have to ask why?’

‘I did. I asked it a moment ago. Still, here we go again: why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s like a badly constructed novel. Everything slightly askew. Nothing quite fitting together.’

‘Yes, you said that before.’

‘Yes, but I’ve thought about it since then. What if this whole thing is some fiction dreamt up by Crispin? What if he wants us to think he’s vanished and that something terrible has happened to him? So he dreams up this scheme by which he can slip away unnoticed on New Year’s Eve, leaving Henry looking as if he’s a murderer? Then he plants all sorts of clues along the way.’

‘Why Henry?’

‘I don’t know – but there’s clearly bad blood there of some sort.’

‘OK, but if that’s true, why text Henry to tell him that he’s alive and well?’

‘That’s what I mean. The plot is full of inconsistencies.’

‘It doesn’t sound like a Crispin Vynall novel, then. Say what you like, he can put a plot together. More like one of your own novels, when you think about it.’

‘That’s a little harsh,’ I said.

‘Not according to Thrillseeker.’

‘You mean according to Crispin,’ I said. ‘What now?’

‘Biscuit time!’ Elsie announced.

‘Is it?’

‘It is in Hampstead.’

‘I see.’

‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s possible I may have some answers for you by then, though it’s equally possible that I won’t.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Jaffa Cakes or Jammy Dodgers?’ she added. But I don’t think she was talking to me.

‘I’ve just got back from Emma Vynall’s,’ I said to Henry.

‘You’ve been there
again
?’ There was more than a little concern in his voice.

‘There were other questions I wanted to ask her.’

‘You could have phoned her. You’re phoning me,’ said Henry.

‘I might not have discovered what I discovered.’

‘Which was …?’

‘Henry, why did you tell Emma that Crispin was
sleeping with a friend of hers? That’s why Crispin walked out. They had an argument over it – except it wasn’t even true. It was just something you had invented.’

There was a long pause.

‘Is that what Emma said?’

‘I’d scarcely be making it up. Why did you do it?’

Another pause.

‘I didn’t.’

‘She says you did.’

‘Ethelred, you must have seen how she’s drinking these days? She always did put it away, but she must be on a couple of bottles a day now.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘She gets a bit … well, confused. She hardly knows where she is sometimes. You must have noticed that?’

‘So you didn’t phone her?’

‘No, I did phone. Of course I did. It was between Christmas and New Year. I’d been talking to Crispin about New Year’s Eve. He’d mentioned that he and Emma had had a row and she’d pretty much thrown him out.’

‘I thought you said you hadn’t talked to Crispin about that.’

‘I didn’t talk to him on New Year’s Eve about it. This was a few days before. Anyway, it was clear that he wasn’t going to contact Emma, so I did – just to say that he was safe, and that she shouldn’t worry. She was very, very drunk that evening and it took a while for me to get the message across.
She
kept telling
me
that Crispin was having a relationship with a friend of hers – not the other way round. I wasn’t that interested, to tell you the truth. I just wanted her to understand that everything was OK. I obviously failed miserably.’

‘Henry, you and Crispin were on good terms – right up to the last time you saw him?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You remember this reviewer, Thrillseeker, who was giving me so many one-star reviews on Amazon?’

‘Was that his name?’

‘It turns out he was Crispin.’

‘Crispin was giving you one-star reviews under an alias?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you say he was calling himself?’

‘Thrillseeker.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s just how the Internet works. People use these aliases.’

‘Gosh! So, how did you work it out?’

‘He gave himself away in a discussion group – he forgot he’d signed in under that alias. He said “I” when he should have said “he”.’

‘That’s impressive detection work.’

‘I wondered … if he’d done the same thing to you?’

‘I hardly ever read reviews for my own books on Amazon, so I’ve no idea. You’ll have to show me how it all works – how you do reviews online.’

‘Yes, OK. Thanks for your own review of my books, by the way – the one in the
Telegraph
, I mean. I thought you had some really interesting things to say about the way my books have developed since—’

‘Yes, of course. Glad you liked it. I’ve got to go now, Ethelred. Let me know if you come up with anything else.’

‘Well …’ I said. I had planned to tell him that Crispin’s text message had really been for him. But I was beginning to wonder if that was so. If Crispin was indeed out there pulling the strings, maybe it had been intended for me all along. Maybe I was being drip-fed information as and when Crispin thought I needed to have it and for reasons I did not understand.

I might have asked Henry what he thought of that theory. But he had long since hung up.

Ethelred was right, of course. His marriage to Geraldine had been inexplicably happy. He must have been aware that she was playing away, but he somehow managed to disregard it, the way an oyster coats a bit of grit with nacre until it is in possession of a pearl. Of course, the pearl is sod-all use to the oyster, but there’s a limit to what can be done with analogy, metaphor, simile and all the other crap writers use. My point is simply that Ethelred has a great but little used capacity to be genuinely happy. He wasn’t always the morose git that he is now. He says so himself. He tells me I’d be amazed how much he enjoyed life in the old days before I knew him.

I’ve had a theory for a long time about Ethelred’s love life. I sometimes think that he feels he doesn’t deserve to be happy. Maybe he reckons he let Geraldine down in some way – that if he’d been a better husband she
wouldn’t have needed anyone else. Maybe he reckons he let himself down – that he should have done more to keep her than just saying: ‘are you absolutely sure about that?’ when she said she was leaving. These days he has the same relationship with love that a bulimic teenager does with food. He’ll bolt it down, but half an hour later he’s throwing it all up again and looking sorry for himself.

Or, if that’s overanalysing things a bit, let’s just say he’s a dickhead.

It was the relationship between Henry and the Vynall family that was really starting to interest me, though. If Ethelred fancied Emma, then why shouldn’t Henry do the same? Of course, Emma was too old for him, but then so were his bow ties and waistcoats. I could see Henry getting a bit of a crush on her the same way as Ethelred, and maybe feeling protective towards her, the same way that Ethelred usually felt about this or that bitch who wanted to get her claws into him. The difference was that Henry would actually notice that Crispin was not treating the lady right.

I also still wondered if Crispin was reviewing Henry under a different alias. I decided to check Henry’s reviews and see if there were any patterns there and – hey, what do you know? – there were no trolls after him but he had an admirer. Somebody calling themselves Sussexreader thought he was brill.

Here’s an example of what Sussexreader thought of one of Henry’s books, and posted only a day or so ago:

And so on and blah-de-blah-de-blah. There were ten reviews in all – much the same as the one above. Sussexreader, a bit like Thrillseeker, seemed to concentrate mainly on one single writer he admired, though that is not completely unknown on Amazon. I checked his reviews for other writers. Nothing for Ethelred, good or bad. Nothing for Crispin Vynall. A couple of nice five-star reviews for Peter James and one each for Peter Lovesey, Joan Moules and Simon Brett, all Sussex-based, suggesting that Sussexreader took the ‘Sussex’ bit of his alias seriously and also read widely within the genre. Everything suggested he was knowledgeable and literate.

Yet there was something about them that was vaguely familiar – as if I’d read the guy’s work before.

I needed to talk to somebody who knew Crispin well,
and I doubted that I could pitch up on Emma’s doorstep with a copy of
Murderous Hampstead
(say) and hope to question her without her suspecting anything. Who else would know him well, I wondered?

That’s why I have just phoned Mary Devlin Jones, and arranged to meet her in Holborn tomorrow morning.

Extract from a tape recording. The two people whose voices feature on the tape would appear to be Elsie Thirkettle (ET) and Mary Devlin Jones (MDJ). Diary entries point to the date being on or about 10 January. The background noise and the opening conversation suggest a cafe.