The Herring Seller's Apprentice (13 page)

It was not only Elizabeth’s house but her person that presented a contrast with Charlotte. Like Charlotte and Geraldine, Elizabeth was blonde, but there all similarity ended. Delicate and petite, she had sometimes struck me as resembling a small startled deer; albeit a very determined deer who was utterly convinced of the rightness of her cause. Conventionally, she should have been a beauty – slim, blonde, fine-featured – but there was a semi-permanent down-turn of her mouth, which left one with the feeling that she was, in the end, unremarkable. To describe her as plain – something that I think I may have implied before – is perhaps a little unfair, but she did not turn heads in the street. Nor did she have any special talents that I was aware of. Viewing her current opulence, you could only feel that this was a small deer that had landed neatly on its hoofs.

She greeted me warmly but without surprise. The preparations for an indulgently late children’s bed-time were handed over to a young but apparently efficient nanny, who whisked a small girl and boy off up a flight of heavily carved oak stairs to what was (I was sure) a warm bathroom full of steam and soft, thick towels.

We in turn were led through into a large, black-beamed sitting room, with low ceilings and a vast inglenook fireplace. Elizabeth added another log to an already more than adequate blaze before saying to me, ‘Well, I suppose I don’t need to ask what brings you here.’

‘I assume that the police contacted you as well?’ I asked.

‘Of course. I was pleased to discover that I was a prime suspect.’

‘Rupert did say that you had issued death threats,’ I observed.

Elizabeth gave a funny little laugh. ‘Death threats?
Moi?
The poor boy always did have a vivid imagination. I would scarcely have wasted time on Geraldine. Why should I? The silly woman saved me from a lifetime of penury. Rupert was never going to earn any money. He wasn’t going to inherit much either.’

‘He must have inherited some,’ I said. ‘Geraldine managed to defraud him of two hundred thousand just before she vanished.’

‘Oh, do me a favour,’ said Elizabeth, in tones that she had certainly acquired from her second husband. ‘That’s not
money.
Dennis earns more than that in a year. Much more.’

‘He doesn’t need an agent, does he?’ asked Elsie, who could calculate 12½ per cent of any figure in nanoseconds.

Elizabeth made a nervous, thin-lipped smile, in the way that she did when she did not entirely understand something, which in the old days had been quite often.

‘So, did the police give you a hard time?’ she asked me.

‘Not really. I was in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire at the critical time. You?’

‘I was on a business trip with Dennis. Strasbourg.’

Elsie mouthed at me, ‘S
WITZERLAND
?’

I mouthed back: ‘F
RANCE
.’ I was going to add, ‘Former imperial free city, now seat of the European Parliament,’ but it’s a tricky one to mouth in full.

‘We were there for four days,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘Apparently we arrived the day before Geraldine vanished. The constabulary lost interest in me pretty quickly anyway. Much to Dennis’s relief: the Old Bill make him jittery, he says.’

I bet, I thought. ‘They seem to suspect a serial killer,’ I said.

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘Well, I had nothing to do with it, obviously. Why should I? I would scarcely want to risk all of this for a bit of petty revenge on a stupid cow like Geraldine. The police saw that straight away.’

‘And how was Strasbourg?’ I asked.

‘Oh, dull. Good shopping. Good food. But dull. I only really went to keep an eye on Dennis. Stop watching him for a moment and …’ She gave a glance at the ceiling above.

‘He’s screwing the nanny?’ asked Elsie with her usual sensitivity and tact.

‘Not this one, or at least not yet. But the last one … She had to go, obviously. Dennis thought I might leave him.’ Elizabeth gave a funny, strangled sort of laugh. ‘He should be so lucky. There was never the slightest question about who would be going out through that door. Any more trouble and he knows I’ll take the kids, the house and every penny he’s got.’ Just for a moment a look of such intensity crossed her face that I could have believed her capable of almost anything to protect what she had gained. Then the face relaxed again and she smiled. ‘It will be another fifteen minutes until the children want their bed-time story. Would you like a tour of the house? It’s listed. Grade Two Star. That’s heaps better than Grade Two.’

I offered to drop Elsie off in Hampstead, but that, as she pointed out, left her car stranded in Findon. Since it would be too late, once in Findon, for her to drive back again to London that night, we agreed that one or other of us would have to sleep on the sofa, while Elsie slept in my bed.

For most of the journey Elsie remained deep in thought. We proceeded together over the Dartford Bridge in silence, the river black and silvery far beneath us. The rain started to fall heavily as we drove back through Kent. Once or twice I found myself almost dropping off to sleep, lulled towards an easy slumber by the gentle sound of the windscreen wipers beating out their rhythm and the tyres sloshing through the surface water.

Somewhere near Crawley, Elsie broke her unaccustomed abstinence from speech. ‘Ethelred,’ she said suddenly. ‘If you did bump Geraldine off, then, however you managed it and whenever it was you did it, I’ll say you were with me in Hampstead. I’ll say you were in bed with me, if it would help.’

It was too dark for her to see my smile. ‘That really won’t be necessary,’ I said. ‘I was in France and not in bed with anyone.’

‘Just so long as you know the offer is there. For that evening or any other.’

‘Thank you. But I won’t need it.’

We drove up to Greypoint House a little after eleven thirty with the rain still falling. I was surprised to see a police car outside. As I parked the car a uniformed officer and a detective got out and walked over towards me.

‘Good evening, Mr Tressider. We would be grateful if you would accompany us to the police station to answer some further questions.’

‘I suppose it can’t wait until tomorrow morning?’ I asked.

‘I am afraid not,’ said the detective.

‘I am obviously keen to help you but I really am very tired.’

‘This is not an optional visit,’ said the detective.

‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked.

‘Not at present, but that could be arranged.’

‘You don’t seem to be offering me much choice.’

‘That’s right,’ said the detective with a smile. ‘Shall we go?’

I was driven into Worthing in the police car, leaving Elsie to make herself at home in my flat. It was the fastest journey into town I have ever done, though to my disappointment they did not switch the siren on, thus depriving me of an ambition I have had since boyhood.

As we entered one of the small, stuffy interview rooms at the police station, my tiredness was replaced with a cautious alertness. I still did not sense danger exactly, but I knew that I would need to be careful over the next hour – perhaps over the next two or three hours. There were still questions that I was keen not to have to answer and, in any case, it would be useful to know how much, if anything, they knew that I did not.

The detective returned with an inspector, who switched on a small tape-recording device and announced to it who was present in the room and that it was by now somewhat after midnight.

‘We think, Ethelred, that you may be able to help us a little further with our inquiries.’

‘Mr Tressider,’ I said. ‘You call me Mr Tressider. I call you Inspector, unless you have some other form of address you prefer.’

He was slightly taken aback by this. ‘Very well – Mr Tressider – have you seen this before?’ He turned to the recording machine and addressed it: ‘I am showing
Mr
Tressider exhibit A.’

He handed me, in a clear plastic case, Geraldine’s ‘suicide’ note. I looked at it briefly.

‘I have seen a photocopy before. I’ve never seen the original,’ I said, handing it back to him.

The inspector and detective exchanged a significant glance.

‘Can we get this straight,’ said the inspector slowly. ‘You have never seen the original of the suicide note before?’

‘Never in my life.’

‘Then perhaps you could explain –
Mr
Tressider – why it has your fingerprints all over it?’

It was a bit like those poxy Rubik’s cubes that everyone used to buy – bloody stupid things. Basically you start with a cube that’s all red on one side,all blue on another,all green on the third,and so on and so on.Then you twist them round so that the colours are all mixed up. Then you twist them round again to get them back where you started. Now, you will immediately see two objections to this. 1) If you want them back as they were, why mess with them in the first place? And 2) nobody I know has
ever
managed to get them back the way they were without a large hammer and a tube of glue. You get one side all red and another all yellow, then you twist it around to get a third all orange and you’ve mucked up the other two.Then you get the yellow one right, and you’ve lost the sodding orange one. There was a time when you found a lot of them in Oxfam shops.

It was like that with Geraldine’s murder, but without the Oxfam get-out. As soon as I got one bit of the story clear in my head, I realized that it had just put another bit out of joint. So, as we splashed our way southwards that evening, through dark and wet Essex and darker, wetter Kent, I kept turning the problem this way and that.

Geraldine was dead.When it came down to it, I decided, that was the only stone-cold certainty. And of course she had been planning to disappear. (Probably.) The ‘suicide’ fitted neatly into a disappearing scheme. So did opening a bank account in an assumed name and transferring large sums of money that didn’t belong to her out the country.

Then there were plenty of things pointing to an accomplice. How had she hoped to get away from West Wittering – particularly dressed as she had been? What were the funny yellow dots in her flat that Ethelred had been so keen to write off as red herrings? Were they to help somebody who was going to organize things for her after she left? Yes, definitely. But who? And why hadn’t that person shown up to do whatever it was he or she was supposed to do?

Something had clearly gone badly wrong with the plan, because, before Geraldine could fly off to Switzerland as planned, somebody strangled her and left her body on Cissbury Ring. Then somebody went and cleaned out the bank account in Switzerland. So was the person who killed her the same one who went to Switzerland?

Then there was something else that kept coming back to me: Why West Wittering? Why Cissbury Ring? I mean, there’s lots of coastline. It’s all over the place: sand, salty water, seagull crap. There’s really no shortage of the stuff. For Christ’s sake, why Sussex? It all seemed deliberately designed to throw suspicion on Ethelred. But Ethelred would scarcely have chosen Cissbury Ring to dump a body, so if somebody was trying to pin the murder on him, it wasn’t even subtle. And he was in
France.

Wasn’t he?

But equally I didn’t buy the police theory, as explained to me by Ethelred, that Geraldine had, quite coincidentally, been murdered by a serial killer. The other victims had been Sad Cows, whereas Geraldine was a Scheming Bitch – another species entirely. Your experienced serial killer would scarcely be so careless as to murder one in mistake for the other. Geraldine was not the sort of person to fall into the crude type of trap that had been laid for the other victims. And how did the police theory explain – assuming they knew about it – the withdrawal of the cash?

And deep down I was certain that Ethelred knew a great deal more than he was telling me. He hadn’t the slightest interest in finding Geraldine’s killer. In spite of everything he said, he really had no interest in finding the money either. But there was something else that he was
desperate
to know, and he had no intention of telling me what it was. Yes, Ethelred was about to make a total idiot of himself. On second thoughts, in the end,
that
was the thing I was most certain of.

We must have been well past the Dartford Bridge when I turned to Ethelred and said: ‘If you did bump Geraldine off, then, however you managed it and whenever it was you did it, I’ll say you were with me in Hampstead. I’ll say you were in bed with me, if it would help.’

‘That really won’t be necessary’ he said. ‘I was in France and not in bed with anyone.’

‘Just so long as you know the offer is there. For that evening or any other,’ I said. I was shocked to realize that by ‘any other’ I meant future evenings as well as past.

Thank you. But I won’t need it,’ he said.

At that moment his face was lit up by the headlights of an oncoming car. I saw him clearly only for a second or so, but he had a broad grin on his face. He really was quite pleased with himself. You silly tart, I thought, what
are
you playing at?

It was no surprise to
me
when the police took him away.

Once inside the flat, however, my mind started working fast. The more information I had, the easier it would be to help Ethelred. What he wouldn’t tell me, I had to find out for myself. The last time I was in his flat I’d had an hour or so to find what I wanted. This time I reckoned I had thirty years, less time off for good behaviour. Still, there was no harm in making a start.

The first thing to decide was who might have information that I didn’t. A quick flick through Ethelred’s address book turned up the Office Boy, Darren Oxtoby. On the journey to Feldingham I had wheedled a little bit of information out of Ethelred about young Darren. I knew that he had worked for Geraldine for a while and that he was a writer (or at least wanted to be a writer), which might work to my advantage. It was a bit after midnight, so what would a keen young writer be doing? Burning the old midnight oil and working on his masterpiece, obviously. So it wasn’t too late to call him.

The phone rang for a bit and then a slightly confused voice answered.