Crooked Herring (6 page)

The phone had possibly been ringing for some time when I stretched an arm from under the warm duvet. I groped for a moment in the icy air and eventually made contact with the handset. The green figures on my bedside clock showed me that it was just after one o’clock in the morning. Only one person in the entire world would think that I would be delighted to take her call in the middle of the night.

‘Hello, Elsie,’ I said.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said.

‘It’s ten past one,’ I interrupted. ‘I was asleep.’

‘No you weren’t. You had to be awake to pick up the phone.’

‘I was asleep before that,’ I said.

‘Not
immediately
before that,’ she said. ‘You also had to be awake to hear the phone ringing.’

‘Yes, because the phone woke me.’

‘There you are, then. You were awake. I don’t know why you have to make such a fuss about things. I’ve been checking up on Thrillseeker’s reviews for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s odd he’s reading so many books he hates.’

‘His problem, not mine.’

‘But interesting. He’s reviewed you twenty times and given you one star each time.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You’ve counted them? That’s sad.’

‘You’ve counted them too.’

‘It’s my job. I’m your agent. Do you know who else he’s reviewed?’

‘You’ve checked?’

‘Absolutely. It’s not difficult to search for other reviews. Would you like me to give you a tutorial on the Internet sometime?’

‘No, I can manage quite well, thank you.’

‘So, who do you think he gives five-star reviews to? He likes thrillers.’

‘Yes, the clue’s in the name.’

‘So, guess,’ Elsie invited me.

I looked at the clock. 01.12. I yawned. ‘Could this wait until the morning?’

‘Of course it could. So are you going to guess who else he’s reviewed?’

‘I don’t know. Dennis LeHane?’

‘One rather grudging four-star review.’

‘Dan Brown? Stieg Larsson? Jeffery Deaver? Lee Child?’

‘Nope. None of them.’

‘Ambler? Harrison? Patterson? Ludlum?’

‘Negative. Somebody you know well.’

‘Not Henry Holiday?’

‘He certainly writes the right type of books. But no reviews for Henry. At least none from our friend Thrillseeker.’

‘Who then?’

‘Who does Henry imitate slavishly?’

‘Crispin?’

‘That’s right. Crispin Vynall. Thrillseeker really loves Crispin Vynall.’

‘Well, I suppose there won’t be a lot of people who like my work and his.’

‘There aren’t a lot of people who like your work full stop, Ethelred. But that’s a discussion for another day. My point is: isn’t it a bit weird that of all the writers in all the world, the one he likes is precisely the one whose disappearance you are investigating?’

I gave this some thought. In a darkened room in the early hours of the morning a lot of things seem weird. I could hear the wind blowing in the trees and, in the distance, I thought I could make out the sound of the coal-black sea, breaking on a bleak and lonely shore. From inside the house I heard a creaking sound: perhaps the last contraction of still-cooling copper pipes, as the central heating system finally settled down for the night. Or perhaps …

‘How many reviews from Thrillseeker for Vynall?’ I asked.

‘About the same as for you. All five star. Vynall’s the finest writer of his generation, it would seem.’

‘Where does Thrillseeker live?’

‘London, so he claims.’

‘Any other details? Blog? Website?’

‘Nope.’

‘And it’s just me and Vynall he’s reviewed?’

‘LeHane, as I say. And a five-star review for an old John Le Carré. But it’s mainly just the two of you.’

‘A coincidence,’ I said.

‘But a weird coincidence.’

Out of nowhere rain suddenly lashed against the window, making me jump. I pulled myself into a sitting position and switched the light on.

‘Are you still there?’ Elsie was saying.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m just switching the light on.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s quarter past one and it’s dark down here in Sussex. There’s still one thing that puzzles me—’

‘Quarter past one?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry, Ethelred, but I really have to go to bed. It’s been a long day and, unlike you, I have to do some work tomorrow. I need my beauty sleep, even if you don’t.’

I was left feeling that I had in some way disturbed her by taking her call. When we next spoke she would probably chide me gently for it.

I carefully replaced the phone, switched the light off and tried to go back to sleep. I lay there listening to the rain on the window glass and the sea crashing onto the dark, unloved beach. The minutes passed. When I next looked at the clock it was one-thirty and I was still wide awake.

I somehow doubted that Elsie was.

The sky was low and grey, and the drizzle was constant. The land, sodden after weeks of rain, was now flatly declining to soak up any more. Puddles on either side of the main road had broadened in places into gently rippling sheets of unknowable depth that stretched from verge to verge. The fields were starting to resemble lakes, contained only by skeletal hawthorn hedges and dark poplars.

The first part of my journey to Chichester crossed countryside as level as any in England. But I was driving towards the chalk hills. In the distance, the South Downs appeared as a low and misty line on the horizon. I motored though Birdham at a cautious thirty-nine miles an hour, aware of both the speed cameras and the standing water; then, reaching slightly drier road, I put my foot down on the accelerator for a couple of gently winding miles.

But the whole time I was glancing at the rear-view,
checking which cars were behind me. A large black Nissan had tailgated me as far as the Itchenor turn-off, oblivious of the spray that I was throwing up. But he was a little too close and a little too obvious to be somebody trying to follow me unobtrusively. Then a white Peugeot seemed to appear from nowhere; but, having driven patiently behind me for a mile or so, it had suddenly performed a dangerous, semi-aquatic overtaking manoeuvre just before the Birdham roundabout, sending a shower of water about ten feet into the air. It hung a right, as they say, and sped off towards the nurseries and market gardens of Earnley. But once beyond Birdham, and for a long time afterwards, I was alone in my watery world.

Of course, the fact that I wasn’t being followed didn’t mean that nobody wanted to kill me. There was quite possibly somebody out there visiting the same places and asking the same questions as I was. Was I the first to take the road to Didling Green or was my shadow already there? It was lonely on the Chichester road, but at this time of year the Downs would be lonelier still. I turned up the heating in the car a notch or two, switched the radio to Classic FM and drove on. The drizzle turned to steady, unrelenting rain. Only Vivaldi thought that spring was on the way.

I had been to Didling Green a few times before but, even if it had been my first visit, I would have known where I was the moment I entered the village. The main street, with its thatched cottages framed by the gently rounded bowl of the Downs, has featured in many calendars with titles such as Beautiful Sussex or Picturesque England or Colourful
Britain or perhaps even Inconveniently-Arranged-but-Ridiculously-Expensive-Cottages. It’s an image that seeps subliminally into your stock of memories, so that chancing unexpectedly on the real thing can be a genuine shock. Many casual visitors probably do a double take as they get out of their car and wonder in which of their past lives they lived there.

But I had been there before, so I simply parked my car by the church and walked across the green, trying to get a view of the steeple from underneath some trees. There were lilacs in the gardens of the houses on the other side. It was possible that Henry could have stood under those. It would certainly have given him the view he described – the weathervane, the clouds. But it would have scarcely felt like a proper wood, however much Henry had had to drink.

At the far corner of the green, however, a narrow lane led off towards the Downs, more or less as I had remembered and approximating to Henry’s own description. I walked back to my car, started the engine and set off in that direction. The steady rain had become a heavy downpour. Water cascaded down both sides of the road in two brown torrents, carrying leaves and twigs before them.

For a few hundred yards it was a passable carriageway, then, just beyond what proved to be the last house in the village, I found myself driving on what was no more than a farm track, leading muddily upwards towards an undefined destination. No signs gave a clue to where I was going. I slowed to about five miles an hour, and continued on my way in first gear, the car’s suspension audibly protesting every few feet, weaving to and fro to avoid the stones and
the potholes. Ahead of me though, viewed through my windscreen with the aid of the wipers going at full speed, was an undoubted mass of trees, the rain swirling around them. Just before we reached them was an impromptu car park – really a widening of the road big enough to take half a dozen or so cars belonging to people setting off on walks over the Downs. On a cold, wet January day, I had it all to myself. I swung the car into the middle of it and cursed as the wheels started to spin helplessly in the soft mud. I’d be lucky to get it out on my own.

But I was at least here now. I waited for a couple of minutes, listening to the drumming of the rain on the car roof. Then, with reluctance, I opened the door and breathed in the smell of damp leaves. There were plenty of old car tracks rutting the surface of the road, but nothing new as far as I could tell. Of course, there were plenty of other ways of getting here. I tried to work out where I would have concealed myself if I wanted to spring a surprise attack on an unsuspecting victim – a crime writer investigating a murder, say. Actually, there were too many places to easily count. For a good five minutes I stood perfectly still, watching the bushes and the trees for any sign of movement. Not a squirrel was stirring on a day like this. I carefully locked the car door and set off up the hill.

A hundred paces or so took me to the edge of the wood, from where I could look down on Didling Green. There was the church and its weathervane, but from this angle he would have seen fields and hedges behind it, not clouds. Still, that didn’t mean he hadn’t come here. Perfect recall was not to be expected. Water dripped copiously from the bare branches above my head, dampening my shoulders
and running down my neck. I had stayed here long enough. With the mud sucking at my boots, I pressed on into the gloomy woods.

For a while the path twisted between the trees. I trod alternately in soft, creamy-coloured goo and sodden black drifts of leaves before finally emerging onto a broad, grassy track that crossed the open Downs. The downpour had slackened. Everything up there was enveloped in a vapour that was neither exactly mist nor objectively rain. Small diamonds of water hung on the sheep-cropped turf. I pulled my collar up and wondered what Henry was doing just now and exactly how high he had turned up his central heating.

But I was not, I discovered, entirely alone. A figure emerged over the brow of the hill just in front of me. She wore a brown hat with a broad brim and a matching cape-like waterproof, which flapped damply around her. Her dog, oblivious of everything else, dashed backwards and forwards, its nose a fraction of an inch above the ground. If I was to do my work as an amateur detective in private, then I’d have to wait until she had passed on her way. So, I did wait as patiently as I could, trying to pretend that standing motionless on a windswept hill in January was not in any way unusual.

‘Good morning,’ I said as she approached.

I’d expected her to say the same and press on, but she stopped abruptly and peered at her watch before nodding a reply. She regarded me suspiciously.

‘Not a great day for walking,’ I said.

‘You don’t have much choice when you own a dog, do you?’ she replied. ‘If I don’t take her out, she’s whining
and scratching at the door. Where’s yours gone? Off after the rabbits, I expect? There won’t be many out in this weather.’ She turned the way I had been looking a minute or so before as if hoping to catch sight of him.

‘I don’t have a dog,’ I said.

‘No dog?’

‘Not of any sort.’

‘What on earth are you doing up here, in that case?’

‘I felt like a walk,’ I said.

She shook her head and tactfully refrained from telling me that I was an idiot.

‘Well, I’d better get on,’ I said, as if my walk was the first stage of an ascent of Everest.

‘Where are you off to?’

I decided not to say that, as soon as she was out of the way, I would be going back down the hill to look for dead bodies. I realised, however, that I had no idea what lay over the ridge that I was apparently heading for.

‘South Downs Way,’ I said ambiguously. It ran all through Sussex parallel to the coast. I had to be close to it.

‘You’re going in the wrong direction,’ she said. ‘You need to go back down to the village and take the path by the pub.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

She waited, maybe expecting me to accompany her and her dog back along the path.

‘I’ll check the map,’ I said.

‘Are you saying I don’t know where the South Downs Way is?’

‘I mean, I was going roughly that way. I might press on a bit up this track, then circle round.’

‘That won’t work. You need to go back the way you came. I walk this way almost every day, summer and winter, and I’m not a total fool.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll check the map first.’

‘Suit yourself. Molly!’

The retriever, which had strayed some way from us, glanced briefly over its shoulder and continued sniffing.

‘
MOLLY
!’

This, at the top of the woman’s voice, gained reluctant recognition, and the dog loped slowly towards us, its tail wagging.

‘Bad dog,’ she said to it.

The dog put its head on one side, as if giving this suggestion its most careful consideration.

‘Bad dog,’ she repeated.

The dog wagged its tail even harder and then, giving a sudden bark of defiance, ran off down the hill. The woman shook her head as if this were in some way my fault. Then she too set off, though at a much slower pace.

‘Molly!’ she yelled. ‘
MOLLY
!
BAD DOG
!’

Just as they entered the trees, the woman gazed back at me, still standing where I was. For about ten seconds she seemed to be taking in every aspect of my appearance, or perhaps she was just checking that I was safe. She clearly regarded me as a complete fool, scarcely responsible enough to be allowed out alone and an unfortunate influence on other people’s dogs. Then she and Molly vanished into the wood. Her low opinion of me was not unreasonable. If I had explained what I was actually doing, it would probably have been lower still.

I had told Henry that I was going ahead with the
investigation because I wasn’t going to be scared off the case. That sounded good. Actually, I’d have dropped the case in an instant if I’d felt there was any real danger. What had happened was that I’d just drifted slowly round to the view, which was not unlike Elsie’s, that spending a day out in the rain in order to get a glowing review in a national newspaper – an increasing rarity as editors cut the space they allocated to book reviews – was as good a use of my time as any. It was legitimate PR and that consideration overrode even Henry’s patent ingratitude. I was surprised that Elsie, having done the same calculation, hadn’t got me emailing every reviewer in London to ask whether they had any little murders that needed investigating. Of course, it was fraudulent in the sense that I had no chance at all of bringing back any useful information to Henry but that wasn’t my problem.

I must have felt slightly guilty at my own cynicism, however, because I dutifully put in time checking the undergrowth on either side of the track as I walked back down through the woods and towards my car. Where paths led off into the trees, I even followed them for a bit until they petered out. On one path, very close to the car, I did detect recent footprints; and somebody more fancifully inclined than I might have made out the signs of a heavy object having been dragged along. I walked up and down that one a couple of times, wishing that I had brought a stick with which to probe the brambles on either side. As it was, I caught no glimpse of a bloody corpse, and this did not surprise me greatly. There was no corpse to find. Crispin Vynall was also probably by now back home and enjoying a coffee in front of the fire.

It was the sound of the church clock striking twelve that brought me to my senses. I gave up being an amateur detective of any sort and returned to my car. There was no evidence that anyone had tampered with it in my absence. And, contrary to my fears, I was able to back it slowly in a quarter circle, leaving me facing downhill with a clear if muddy road ahead.

My final duty was to visit the pub. I ordered a sandwich and a pint of shandy.

‘Fairly quiet today,’ I added.

The barman looked up from his order pad. ‘It’s early,’ he said.

‘You were probably packed for New Year’s Eve.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Not a great conversationalist.

‘A friend of mine was here. He said it was a good evening.’

‘Did he? Yes, it wasn’t bad. Do you want any chutney with that?’

‘Please. That would be good. His name’s Henry Holiday. He’s a writer.’

The barman nodded sympathetically. ‘You get all sorts round here.’

‘You wouldn’t remember seeing him?’

Sympathy was replaced by puzzlement. ‘If he said he was here, I’m sure he was, but there were quite a few customers I didn’t recognise. It’s like that on New Year’s Eve. We’ve just pinned up a few photos that various people took that evening. They’re over there on the board. You might spot your friend. I’ll get this order to the kitchen, then.’

With every table in the pub to choose from, I elected to sit by the fire, but first I took a look at the noticeboard. Pinned to it, as promised, were various photographs taken of events at the pub. They must have accumulated over the number of years. Different landlords do different things to please their customers; this one apparently had put together a small display of the regulars enjoying themselves and encouraged people to contribute their own pictures. Some were very faded and looked as though they dated back to the eighties and nineties. But one small group was fresh and stood out from the rest. It was the New Year party. I studied the pictures carefully – the images of assorted strangers, glasses in their hands, their befuddled faces red and shining. At first sight, there was no sign of any crime writers amongst the revellers. Either Henry was mistaken about being in a pub or I had located the wrong one. Then I noticed a figure, slumped in a seat in the background of the very last snap. Half-hidden by the main group, who were the real subject of the shot, he was staring in horror in the photographer’s direction. He wasn’t exactly in focus. Others who knew him less well might not have recognised him. But I did. Tweed jacket. Waistcoat. Yellow bow tie. It was Henry. There was no sign of Crispin with him.