The Herring Seller's Apprentice (2 page)

‘Not in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire. Possibly all manner of depravities were practised in Plessis-les-Tours or Amboise, but I never went to either.’

‘Well then, next time, try Amboise. Hang loose. Get laid. Write it up in your next book.’

‘Not
my
next book. As you well know, I don’t do sex. And, though I cannot be absolutely certain in this matter, I don’t believe that I have ever hung loose.’

‘Is that why your wife left you?’

‘My ex-wife,’ I said. ‘To be pedantically accurate, my ex-wife. Geraldine and I were incompatible in a number of respects.’

‘The main way in which you were incompatible is that she was screwing your best mate.’

‘Ex-best mate,’ I said. ‘He is my
ex
-best mate.’

‘Then the cow walked out on you.’

‘You make it sound rather abrupt and uncaring. She stayed long enough to write me a very touching note.’

‘All right, she’s a literate cow,’ Elsie conceded generously. She’s a fair woman in some ways, though not many. ‘Is she still with the chinless wonder?’

‘Rupert? No, she left him a while ago.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You seem better informed than you should be, Tressider. Don’t tell me you’re still in touch with the old slag?’

‘I must have just heard it from somebody. Why should you think I’m still in contact with her?’

‘Because you’re a prat, that’s why. I’d like to think that you were too sensible to go within a hundred miles of her. Normal people in your position – not that I know many normal people in my line of work, of course – sever all ties with their ex. Making a wax effigy and sticking pins in it is also said to be good. I could get you some wax if you like. There’s this Nigerian bloke down the market. He does pins too.’

‘I think that it’s quite possible to be friends with a former spouse,’ I said. ‘Geraldine and I must have had something in common, after all. We had a number of happy years together, though admittedly she was simultaneously having a number of happy years with somebody else. Life’s too short to be bitter over these things.’

‘OK, Ethelred, stop just there, before I sick up. You’ve just never learned to hate properly, that’s your problem. Stop being nice and start wishing she was rotting in hell. Clearly I’m not saying that you should have to do it single-handed. Geraldine had a very special and remarkable talent for making enemies, and there’ll be lots of others wishing hard along with you for her early and preferably messy demise. But frankly, if she ever turns up murdered, just remember that it is your absolute right to be considered the prime suspect.’

‘But that’s hardly likely to happen,’ I pointed out.

The doorbell rang.

It was a policeman.

He smiled apologetically.

‘I have some bad news, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s about your wife. May I come in?’

I rather like policemen.

I am not one of those authors who write of bumbling incompetent flatfeet who have to be aided by keen-eyed amateur sleuths. Why should I? The amateur detective never existed. I do not know of a single genuine case (and I have now studied many) in which an elderly spinster living in St Mary Mead has afforded the police the slightest assistance. Real cases are not solved by flashes of genius, but by large numbers of people gathering and sifting even larger quantities of information. Criminals are caught by house-to-house inquiries and by tedious hours of studying security-camera pictures frame by frame. Or you get lucky and a close and esteemed colleague grasses them up. The police, in my experience anyway, rarely take the trouble to gather all the suspects together in the drawing room of a country house to announce the result.

But there is a long and particularly English literary tradition of gentleman (and lady) sleuths from Sherlock Holmes, through Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple, to Brother Cadfael. I would hesitate to knock anything that makes money for honest and deserving writers, but it’s a load of twaddle, frankly. In my novels, as in real life, the police investigate murders; the public do their bit by getting murdered. Though one may criticize the Sergeant Fairfax novels for many things, perpetuating the myth of the amateur detective is most certainly not amongst their faults.

It was not, however, a fictional Sergeant Fairfax from Buckford standing at my door. It was a flesh-and-blood constable from the West Sussex Police.

‘You’d better come in,’ I said.

The delicate question of whether Elsie should remain for this possibly awkward interview was quickly solved.

‘You two just carry on. Don’t mind me,’ she told us both; and she settled back in her chair, arms folded, daring us to evict her. I looked at the policeman; he looked at me. We noted each other for the cowards that we clearly were and proceeded to make the best of a bad job.

He gave an officious cough, half in Elsie’s direction, and said, ‘I am afraid that I have to tell you that your wife is missing.’

‘My ex-wife. We were divorced some years ago.’

‘Your ex-wife, of course. For the moment she has simply been reported as a missing person. My apologies for putting this so bluntly, but we have good reason to believe that she may have committed suicide.’

I remained, though I say it myself, admirably composed.

‘I am very sorry to hear that,’ I said, ‘but I can’t see what it has to do with me. Not after all this time.’

‘When did you last see your wife, sir?’

‘My ex-wife?’

‘Your ex-wife.’

‘I can’t remember precisely.’

‘Have you seen her in the past fortnight?’

‘I’ve spent the past three weeks in France, officer. I got back yesterday evening.’

He noted this in a small book that he was carrying.

‘Châteauneuf-sur-Loire,’ I said. ‘Would you like me to spell that?’

He raised his notebook slightly so that I would not be able to see what he had written. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ he said, with a nicely judged degree of contempt for the general public that Fairfax would certainly have commended. ‘Do you know of any reason why she might have wanted to commit suicide?’

‘I can’t pretend to know for certain, but she might have had several good reasons. She has perpetual money problems: her first business went bust round about the time we split up. She went into a second venture with her sister. I think I heard that that was in trouble too. She has also just finished a relationship – quite a long-standing one.’

‘And her former partner was … ?’

‘Rupert Mackinnon. She must have been with him about ten years. I’m not sure of his current address.’

He noted these details without comment.

‘I am sorry,’ I concluded, ‘but I don’t think that I can help you much more than that.’ I stood up, preparatory to showing him out. He remained seated.

‘We had hoped that you might be able to tell us a little more, sir. You see, Mrs Tressider left what we assume was a suicide note in her car before she vanished.’

I nodded. ‘And?’

‘She left the car quite close to here – by the beach at West Wittering.’

I sat down again. ‘Bloody hell,’ I said.

‘Quite. That’s a long way to come from North London to commit suicide. I mean, it may be a coincidence, your living in West Sussex and her leaving the suicide note in West Sussex. But you will see why it struck us as odd, sir, if you know what I mean.’

It struck me as many things, though ‘odd’ was perhaps not the first word to spring to mind.

‘So, she never lived down here, did she, sir?’ he continued, as if to clarify for me an interesting fact concerning my domestic arrangements. He narrowed his eyes, leaving an ominous accusation hanging in the air that I did not like one bit.

‘No, I moved here after we split up.’

‘Then there’s the suicide note.’

He showed me a photocopy of a sheet of what had clearly been headed writing paper. The very top of the sheet had been roughly torn off, leaving a jagged edge, but a few letters of the address could be made out, including ‘N1’. There was something before and something after, but you couldn’t tell what, unless you knew the address that had been there. Which I did, of course.

‘Your wife lived in the N1 postal district of London?’ He raised an officious eyebrow.

‘Yes. Barnsbury Street, Islington.’

‘So it looks like her paper. But what we can’t work out is why she tore the top off like that. The wording’s funny, too.’

I took the note with growing trepidation and read it. It was written in lively block capitals, with playful little curls on a random selection of letters. It read as follows:

‘I mean,’ said the constable, ‘nobody writes “F
AREWELL, CRUEL WORLD
” on a suicide note, do they? Not in real life. You don’t even get that in detective stories, for goodness’ sake.’ He gave a contemptuous sniff.

I’ve seen (and written) worse clichés in crime fiction myself, but perhaps he read nothing but P. D. James and had higher standards than I did. ‘Sorry, officer,’ I said. ‘Having had only a few seconds to look at it, I really am not in a position to speculate on the wording. You say it was left in her car?’

‘That is correct: a red Fiat.’

I must have shown surprise because he quickly added, ‘It was a hire car, not her own. She’d collected it from Hertz at Gatwick airport a few days before it was found. She’d rented it for a week – paid for with her credit card. She must have driven it down to West Wittering the same day, left the note in it and then …’ He paused. ‘Well, of course, we don’t know what happened then. As you will be aware, you have to pay to take your car to the beach there. The gates at West Wittering beach are locked at eight thirty at this time of year. The guard noticed the Fiat on Tuesday when he was doing his final rounds. There are often a few cars still parked there, left by people who’ve gone for a walk along the coast and forgotten the time. There’s a charge for being let out after the gates have closed, but most are usually gone well before midnight. This car was still there the following evening when the guard did his rounds. It was a nice new one too – just 300 miles on the clock – not some dumped old banger, like you get all the time now round here. So he took a closer look and saw this note on the seat. Nothing else in the car, by the way – just the suicide note and the Hertz paperwork. That’s when we were called in. We discovered that your wife had not been home to Islington for a day or so, but her neighbours remembered that you had moved down here, quite close to the Witterings.’

‘I am deeply grateful,’ I said, ‘to her neighbours for pointing this out. Nevertheless, I would remind you that West Wittering is forty-five minutes’ drive at least, even if you don’t get held up going round Arundel.’

‘Bloody Arundel bypass,’ he said with a nod. Then he sucked on a tooth for a bit before adding, ‘You don’t know where she might have left her own car, do you, sir?’

‘No. Absolutely not. What sort of car does she have now anyway?’

‘It’s a Saab convertible. Metallic black with alloy wheels. Nice cars, them Saabs. Good cornering. Decent bit of acceleration. That’s missing too, you see. But it may show up. It could even be in for repairs somewhere, hence the hire car.’

He asked me a few more questions, feeling no doubt that he owed it to the Council Tax payers of West Sussex to cover the matter comprehensively; but there was little that I could usefully tell him, other than to repeat that it had been a while since I had been in touch with Geraldine and that, much though I wished I could help, I had no idea where Geraldine was or why she should have abandoned a perfectly good hire car on a Sussex beach.

‘So,’ said Elsie, when I had shut the door behind him, ‘what would Fairfax make of that, eh? A woman vanishes close to the residence of her ex-husband. She leaves a cryptic suicide note in block capitals – not in her usual handwriting – and in a car apparently hired for the purpose.’

‘Last Tuesday the ex-husband was busy not having sex in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, a long way from the place where she vanished.’

‘But why would anyone hire a car to commit suicide in?’ asked Elsie, with her agent’s eye on the bottom line. ‘Why not use your own car? It’s cheaper.’

‘You heard what he said: perhaps her own car was in for a service or something.’

‘Why get your car serviced if you’re about to kill yourself?’

It was an obvious thing to ask, and I wished I had Geraldine there to provide an answer. I had almost thought of a reply when Elsie decided to answer her own question.

‘I have three theories,’ said Elsie, prematurely ticking off the hypotheses one by one on her podgy fingers. ‘First theory, right? She did top herself, and did it in Sussex to cause you as much grief as possible. But that doesn’t explain the missing-car issue, thus I am obviously not too keen on that one. So (therefore), second theory: she did not top herself at all but is very much alive and is sitting in a pub somewhere laughing at us.’

‘Why should she do that?’

‘I don’t know, do I? Maybe she’s faked a suicide and done a runner to avoid her creditors. Or maybe she’s done it all for a giggle.’

‘All right then: she’s killed herself or she hasn’t. That’s still only two theories,’ I said.