Crooked Herring (5 page)

‘And a fifty to sixty per cent chance they are not.’

‘Acceptable odds.’

‘Only if they’re somebody else’s odds.’

‘Oh, come on! Whoever wrote this note is clearly a nutter.’

‘That isn’t as reassuring as you seem to imagine,’ I said.

She picked up the note and examined it again.

‘Ethelred, this note is about as low-tech as you can get. It is not what somebody does if they can really track your every move. It’s not what somebody does if they can listen in on your phone calls and follow each keystroke on your computer. It’s what they do if they want to frighten you off for the cost of a sheet of A4 and an envelope. They couldn’t even be arsed to put a stamp on it, for goodness’ sake.’

‘I’m done with it. End of.’

‘You need the reviews. End of. Anyway, it will be fun.’

‘For you.’

‘But, in a very real sense, for you too. And we need to show them that they can’t scare us.’

‘I said to Henry I wanted nothing more to do with it.’

‘You are allowed to change your mind. Tell him you’ve now got me on the case. That will cheer him up. Tell him that adversity only stiffens your resolve or some crap like that. He’ll respect you and give you an extra couple of column inches. I’ll keep the note for the moment, if I may – I might get further inspiration or at least some innocent amusement. Now, let’s go and take a look at that new house of yours. I’d like to sneer at your curtains before I go back to London. Ten pounds says you’ve got pelmets in the sitting room – or do you refer to it as the lounge?’

It was early evening before I had a chance to phone Henry. He answered at once, almost as if he had been waiting for my call.

‘I’m back on the case,’ I said.

‘I thought you weren’t interested?’

‘Something has happened,’ I said. ‘There’s somebody trying to frighten me off helping you. I’m not going to let them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I had a hand-delivered letter first thing this morning. It informed me that I risked becoming the second corpse in the story unless I took no further part in your case.’

‘Second corpse?’

‘I agree that implies there’s a first corpse out there somewhere, but it doesn’t follow
you
killed the person concerned, still less that it is Crispin.’

‘That’s what you think?’

Well, Elsie felt it ought to be Crispin, but I decided not to give Henry the other key piece of information: that my literary agent was also on the case in a low-risk capacity. I didn’t feel it would cheer him up as much as she supposed.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s what I think. I don’t believe you’ve killed anyone.’

‘But the person who wrote the note reckons I have? Who are they, though?’

‘I suppose you didn’t tell anyone else that you’d asked me to look into things?’ I asked.

‘Certainly not. I don’t want anyone except you to know for the moment.’

‘Well, somebody has clearly managed to find out,’ I
said. ‘And, whoever it is, he or she actually seems to know more about it than we do – if somebody really has been killed.’

‘Look,’ said Henry, dismissing the issue of my death, ‘I may have remembered something else. I told you about that church? Well, I think it may have been in a village called Didsbury Common or Dilling Green or something.’

I thought for a bit. ‘Didling Green?’ I asked. ‘That’s a real place, unlike the other two you mentioned.’

‘Could be. It’s just, whenever I try to recall that picture – the church and the trees – a name like that comes into my head. Did-something. There’s another image I can’t get out of my head too – a lonely track leading up into the hills. It’s tarmac at first, then just mud and rocks. There are hedges on either side and a smell of damp and decay.’

‘A track? Leading from Didling Green up onto the Downs?’

‘It could be. Do you know Didling Green then?’

‘It’s right at the foot of the Downs. I’m sure there’s a road more or less as you describe it. I can’t swear to the damp and decay bit, but the rest sounds right.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ll drive over there and check it out,’ I said. Then, following Elsie’s advice, I added: ‘Nobody’s going to frighten me off this.’

I waited for him to say something that suggested I had gained his respect.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t want to put you at any risk. Not at your age.’

‘I’m scarcely senile,’ I said. ‘I’m as capable as anyone else of staying out of trouble.’

‘Well, that’s pretty courageous of you,’ said Henry. ‘Carrying on with the case, I mean. At any age.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I can handle it.’

Because all the time I was thinking: no serious death threat has a semicolon in it. And I needed some decent reviews.

Still Friday 4th January, which Pepys would have called the 26th December since they were still on the Julian Calendar then, not to mention Old Style and stuff like that. I’m amazed Ethelred doesn’t insist on using the Julian Calendar, thinking about it. He’s just about reconciled to British Summer Time, but you can see the look of relief on his little face every autumn when he can set his gold pocket watch back one hour to Greenwich Mean Time. Maybe I’ll try to get him a genuine Julian Calendar as a Christmas present next year. One where the year number doesn’t change until March, like they used to do until 1752. He’d like that.

Anyway, when I got home from Sussex, I took a look at Ethelred’s bad reviews on Amazon because, though I am immensely sympathetic to all my authors’ little troubles, illiterate diatribes can actually be very funny and provide an agent with many a relaxing evening.

The first thing I noticed about the Thrillseeker reviews was that they were pretty well put together. He (for it seemed to be a man – he occasionally pulled his punches in a way that a woman would not have done) had certainly read each of the books, if not from cover to cover, then at least up to a point that allowed him to put in some very effective plot spoilers. Many of the criticisms were of course ones that I had pointed out to Ethelred myself, but do authors listen? Some of Thrillseeker’s other remarks were heavy-handed, but most had more than a grain of truth in them.

In the old days the only people who wrote reviews were professional critics or other writers. They weren’t necessarily polite, but they did it under their own names and if they didn’t like something they normally gave reasons. These days any tosser can be a book reviewer by logging on and typing in whatever crap comes into their head. And you don’t have to say who you are. Thrillseeker hid like a creep behind his alias. But in one way I respected him. Some reviewers might have occasionally wavered or accidentally given Ethelred two stars, But no. Thrillseeker gave a single lonely star every time.

And, when you thought about it, Thrillseeker had actually put a lot of work into his criticism. He’d read at least twenty of Ethelred’s books – no mean feat, I’m telling you. And, the more I read, the more I wondered, as Ethelred had, why anyone would bother to buy (or even borrow from the library) book after book that they disliked so much. What had Ethelred done to upset him so much?

And another question struck me.

If Thrillseeker didn’t like Ethelred’s books, what the hell did he like?

***** Bloody Brilliant 3 December 2012
By Thrillseeker
Crispin Vynall does it again! It’s rare to find an author who combines a fine literary style and the ability to produce page after page of riveting action. Looking at the sad crop of so-called crime writers we have today, Vynall may be pretty much unique in this respect.

In
A Bad Way to Die
, Joe Smith finds himself the only witness to a gang-land killing. Bravely he goes to the police, who promise him protection if he will testify, but a corrupt officer lets the killers know where to find him and Joe is nolonger safe. Soon he is on the run not knowing who, if anyone, he can trust. The plot never ceases to hold your attention, never ceases to produce surprises right up to the immensely satisfying conclusion.

There is a lyricism to Vynall’s prose that makes him stand out from any of his contemporaries. Only the nauseating envy of the literary establishment on the one hand and the incompetence of the pathetic clique that runs the Crime Writers’ Association on the other prevent him from being hailed as the finest writer of his generation.

***** The book of the year! 30 November 2012
By Thrillseeker
The ability of Crispin Vynall never ceases to amaze me. The man is a genius.

In
Hear No Evil
, DI Arrowsmith of the Liverchester Metropolitan Police is asked to look into a complaint against one of his fellow officers. It quickly becomes clear that the policeman concerned
was responsible for the death of a drunken football fan and that his colleagues are covering up for him. Soon Arrowsmith realises that he has been given the investigation only because it is assumed he will quietly go along with the cover-up. When he refuses to do this, first he is threatened and then his family are targeted; his daughter disappears on her way home from school. CCTV shows her walking along the main road near the family home, with a white car parked just ahead. In the next shot she and the car have gone. Arrowsmith suspects that the police are themselves involved in her abduction; and the only way to get her back is to take the law into his own hands. What follows is a roller coaster of a plot in which every other page springs a new surprise.

It is a complete mystery to me why this book was passed over for the CWA Gold Dagger, but it is undoubtedly the finest crime novel to appear this year or indeed for a very long time.

***** Vynall Does It Again! 29 December 2012
By Thrillseeker
I’ve been so impressed by Vynall’s recent books that I dipped into this gem from the late 1980s, one of his earliest publications. A tourist vanishes, having
last been seen taking a stroll along a cliff-top path. A search of the area by coastguards reveals nothing. Has she fallen or has she somehow been spirited away? A young detective is sent to the small seaside town to investigate and meets a wall of silence. Nobody is willing to admit even to having seen the woman. When a falling boulder narrowly misses him, he begins to fear his own life may be in danger; thus begins the most frustrating and dangerous investigation that DC Christie (DI Christie in later books) will ever have to undertake.

This is a superb early work from a master of his craft, and one that, sadly, received remarkably little attention at the time of its publication.