The Herring in the Library (11 page)

‘Can’t I be the murderer?’ asked Elsie.

‘No, dear, you’re going to be murdered,’ said Annabelle. And very soon. Now, Ethelred – you stand over there to the left of the fireplace – by that panelling. A
little bit further back – yes, just there.’

‘I’m not sure . . .’ I said. Whichever way a killer might have entered, it would not have been from the fireplace.

She looked critically from me to Elsie and back again. I couldn’t see this was getting us anywhere. Then I must have leaned on something because Annabelle suddenly said: ‘Wait a
moment! The panelling – it moved.’

I looked. There was a series of oak Tudor roses carved the length of the room. The one closest to me looked a little more worn than the rest – sort of smoothed. Otherwise it was just a
regular bit of carving.

‘What did I touch? This?’ I still wasn’t sure I had made contact with anything. I could have done no more than brush against it.

‘Press it again,’ said Annabelle. ‘Press it again – harder this time.’

I pressed harder. Then suddenly part of the panelling gaped. Annabelle was by my side in a moment, sliding the whole panel back to reveal an opening, slightly smaller than a standard door, but
allowing access to anyone willing to stoop a little and step into the darkness.

‘It’s a secret passage!’ she said.

‘So it is,’ I said. I looked through the opening into the gloom. ‘I wonder where it goes?’

Annabelle produced a torch from the desk drawer and shone it experimentally into the aperture.

‘It goes some way,’ I said, over Annabelle’s shoulder.

‘Come on, Ethelred,’ said Annabelle. ‘The two of us should check this out together.’

‘Or better still, all three of us,’ said Elsie.

And so, one by one, all three of us stepped through the opening into a stone-floored passageway.

The torchlight showed that the walls on either side were rough, unpolished oak panels. The ceiling was low enough that my hair brushed it once or twice, but not so low that it
felt claustrophobic. In a couple of places there were brackets for candles, but there were also electric light fittings – black bakelite, maybe dating back eighty years or so to a time that I
still think of as ‘early this century’.

We followed the passage for a short distance before reaching a dead end. A quick investigation with the torch revealed a wooden lever, and pulling on the lever opened another panel. We found
ourselves in the billiard room, blinking in the sunlight that was streaming through the windows.

Of course, the passage, like everything else at Muntham Court, was a piece of Victorian whimsy. Just as the architect had added Jacobean strapwork to the exterior, he had thought fit to provide
a secret passage for the amusement of his client and perhaps of his client’s guests. It was a neat nineteenth-century rationalization of the cramped and twisting secret passages of more
ancient buildings. The candles, and later the electric light, would have permitted an entertaining, but completely comfortable, transfer between two of the male strongholds of the house. Its later
neglect, demonstrated by the antiquity of the electrical wiring, suggested that the house’s more recent owners had had no use for it.

‘A way in
and
out,’ said Annabelle thoughtfully. ‘You realize what this means?’

Elsie said nothing but took the torch from Annabelle and retraced her steps, vanishing for a moment round the corner. She quickly returned.

‘Not a way in,’ she said. ‘There must have been a lever, like at this end, but it has broken off at some stage. Can’t get the panel to budge. You can get out of the
library this way, but not in – or at least you can get in only if whoever is in the library opens the panel for you.’

‘This is important,’ I said. ‘We need to tell the police.’

‘Yes,’ said Annabelle. ‘We shall tell the police . . . when we need to. But we don’t want them taking over things just yet – they haven’t exactly been Sherlock
Holmes. Let’s gather all the information we can first. You still need to talk to the others.’

‘I don’t think I’ll find out much more . . .’ I said.

‘Of course you will,’ said Annabelle. ‘You were so clever finding this passage. You can do anything.’

And she gave me a little kiss on the cheek.

Ten

‘So,’ I said to Ethelred, once we were alone together. ‘Let me reconstruct things for you.’

‘We’ve just done that,’ he said, a slight note of irritation in his voice. ‘Annabelle made you sit there, then I—’

‘Not the murder. I mean the little farce that has just been enacted for our benefit.’

‘But—’

‘Oh, come on. Ethelred,
wonderful
Ethelred, just go and stand by that random bit of panelling for no reason at all.’

‘Annabelle doesn’t speak like that,’ said Ethelred. ‘You make her sound whiny and high pitched . . .’

‘It’s close enough for our purposes,’ I pointed out. ‘I don’t claim to be Rory Bremner. Now,
wonderful
Ethelred, why don’t you press
the random bit of panelling? No, press the totally random bit of panelling harder. Well, I’m amazed! A secret passage in my own sweet little house! And I never suspected. Who would have
believed it?’

‘She
doesn’t
talk like that,’ said Ethelred. ‘If Annabelle says she didn’t know about the passage . . . What?’

‘Let’s begin with the killer’s footprints on the dusty floor of the passageway,’ I said.

‘I didn’t see any . . .’

‘Exactly And why didn’t you see any?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘There were no dusty footprints because there was no dust. The passage was as clean as a whistle.’

‘That’s why then,’ said Ethelred. ‘What? Why do you keep looking at me like that?’

‘You’re a man, aren’t you?’

‘When I last checked, yes – though I am a paid-up member of Mystery Women.’

‘Joining a club devoted to the promotion of female crime writers doesn’t make you any less obtuse, unfortunately. If you were a woman in fact rather than in fiction
you would know about dust and its funny little ways. Some women, not me obviously, dust things daily, because if you turn your back on dust, even for a moment, it sneaks into the room and quietly
takes up residence on all horizontal surfaces. A lost passageway should be very dusty and full of cobwebs, not swept so you can eat your dinner off it. That passageway had not been lost for very
long at all.’

‘Maybe the people who lived here before didn’t tell Annabelle . . .’

‘If you were selling a house, would you fail to mention to possible purchasers an interesting little feature like a secret passage-way?’

‘No, but . . .’

‘Annabelle knew very well that secret passage was there. But for some reason she wanted it to stay a secret for just a bit longer. Now, conversely, she wants people to know about
it. Why?’

‘Or, alternatively, she really didn’t know, but just happened to ask me to . . .
What?’

‘You’d believe anything she told you, wouldn’t you?’

‘I need to get on with interviewing people,’ he said, switching the subject with no great subtlety. I let it go. We both knew deep down that she was an unprincipled
slapper. Soon Ethelred would be forced to admit it to himself or, alternatively, I would have to draw him a picture. One or the other. We could see how things progressed.

‘Who do we talk to next?’ I asked.

‘I talk to John O’Brian,’ he said. ‘Just me. I’m sure you’d be happier staying here.’

I weighed up the options: sit on my own in a deserted library full of old dusty books or interrogate a young, muscular hunk of a gardener. It was a tough call.

‘So, John,’ I said, ‘how long have you worked for Lady Muntham?’

John O’Brian swallowed hard and blinked a couple of times in a rather endearing sort of way before replying. He was an outdoors sort of guy and looked uncomfortable
indoors, perched on the chintz seat cover in clean, neatly pressed clothes. He had the type of chin that looks good with a day’s stubble on it and the type of body that looks good with as
little on as possible. I wondered if I could ask him a question that would involve him having to take off his shirt. Difficult, but not necessarily impossible.

‘I’ve worked here since the Munthams moved in,’ he said, swallowing hard. ‘They sacked the old gardener and Lady Muntham recruited me. She needed
somebody younger who could be a bit more active in the garden.’

Which was clearly what she got. ‘And you worked quite closely with Lady Muntham?’ I asked.

‘She’s a keen gardener herself. She likes to get out in the fresh air.’ He was looking at the floor as if he had developed a sudden interest in faded,
moth-eaten carpets.

‘And she would be out in the garden how often?’ I asked.

‘Most days, I suppose.’

‘So, you’d work side by side, as it were? On hot days, possibly without your shirt on?’

‘I’m not sure,’ interrupted Ethelred, ‘that this is terribly relevant. We know that Mr O’Brian works here. It’s what happened yesterday that
we need to concentrate on.’

‘So, John, what happened yesterday?’ I asked, with a sideways glance at Ethelred. I reckoned I could raise the shirt question again later.

‘Like I’ve already told the police,’ said O’Brian, looking up and meeting my eye for the first time. They were nice eyes, now I had their full attention.
Baby blue. ‘Like I told the police, I started work at nine as usual. Lady Muntham wanted things looking right for the guests, so I said I’d keep working until all of the jobs were done.
I raked the gravel. I mowed the lawns and did some weeding and some trimming. When I was done, there was a load of weeds and cuttings and stuff to take to the heap at the back of the house, then
there was the tools to clean and put away, so I kept going until it was almost dark, then I had a wash and went home. This morning, Lady Muntham phoned me and told me that Sir Robert had sadly
passed away and that the police were likely to want to ask me some questions.’

‘And that was the first you knew of Sir Robert’s death?’ asked Ethelred.

‘Yes. It was a bit of a shock, that,’ said O’Brian. ‘I can’t rightly get my head round it.’

‘And you saw nothing odd that evening?’

‘There were the guests arriving, but I didn’t pay much attention. I’d tidied up at the front of the house already.’

‘You saw nobody round the back of the house, near the library?’

O’Brian paused and looked at me and then back at Ethelred and then back at me.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘Maybe?’

‘You’ll have spoken to Mr Brent already?’

‘No, he’s arriving later.’

O’Brian paused again.

‘I did think I saw a fellow in the shrubbery round the back,’ he said at last.

‘One of the guests?’ asked Ethelred.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was wearing this dark blue suit,’ said O’Brian, frowning.

‘Not a dinner jacket?’

‘No, a lounge suit. It was blue. Dark blue.’

‘In the fading light you could confuse the two.’

‘I’m sure it was dark blue,’ insisted O’Brian with a touch of annoyance. ‘Maybe with a faint red stripe.’

‘How tall was he?’

O’Brian clasped his hands together and looked into the distance. ‘How tall? I couldn’t say exactly . . .’

‘Quite tall? Short? Average?’

‘I’d say . . . average,’ said O’Brian.

‘What colour hair?’

Again, a fairly simple question seemed to trouble him. ‘Difficult to tell – it was getting dark, you see, Mr Tressider,’ he said eventually.

‘Blond? Brown? Black?’ asked Ethelred.

‘Brown . . . brown-ish . . . maybe blackish brown.’

‘Sure about that?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘What was the man doing?’

‘Like I said, just loitering, smoking a cigarette. Filter-tip.’

‘No, I don’t think you did say that,’ said Ethelred, making some notes. ‘Did he stay long?’

‘I just sort of glimpsed him,’ said O’Brian. ‘Just for an instant. Then he was gone.’

‘Did you challenge him? He was, after all, in the Munthams’ garden.’

‘I thought he was maybe a guest.’

‘But you just said that you don’t think he was a guest.’

‘I thought
at the time
that he was a guest. Later, after . . . when I thought a bit more, I decided he couldn’t have been.’

‘On what basis?’

‘All of the gentlemen were wearing dinner jackets. So the man couldn’t have been a guest.’

‘What time was this roughly?’

‘I’m not sure. Round about the time the guests were arriving – could be a bit later.’

‘What did you do next?’

‘I was taking the last load of cuttings to the heap, soI just carried on.Then, like I say, I had a wash and went home.’

‘So, not long before Sir Robert was found dead?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ O’Brian looked worried again. Each question seemed to be making him more uncomfortable.

An hour or so before his death, let’s say?’

‘You’ll have to ask Mr Brent.’

‘Did he see him too?’

‘What?’ For a moment O’Brian looked like a cat that had dodged round a corner to avoid a playful terrier and walked into a group of Dobermanns with time on
their hands. He certainly wasn’t enjoying being interviewed.

‘Did Clive Brent see him too?’ repeated Ethelred patiently. He looked up from his notebook in his usual vague manner that might have been masking a razor-sharp
intellect, or more likely just meant that he was working on his shopping list.

‘Somebody said Mr Brent had seen him,’ O’Brian said.

‘Who said that?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll ask Mr Brent when I see him. For the moment let’s just say it was after the guests had arrived?’

‘Yes, after the guests had arrived, certainly.’

‘Thank you,’ said Ethelred, nose now back in his notebook, amending his shopping list.

‘If there’s anything more . . .’ said O’Brian, though he clearly hoped there wasn’t.

‘You’ve been very helpful,’ said Ethelred, closing the notebook.

‘Very helpful,’ I said.

I wondered if O’Brian knew what a crap performance he had just given. Probably not, because he smiled at both of us as if a great weight had just been lifted from his
shoulders, and walked quickly out of the room.