The Herring Seller's Apprentice (6 page)

I placed my glass on a beer mat, the one small dry island on an oak table well watered by its previous occupants. Elsie plonked her glass unconcerned in the beer lake that lapped around it. She was dressed that lunch-time in a sort of turban and long flowing garment that I would have had difficulty in giving a precise name to, though I did not doubt that it was the height of fashion. Elsie was a small plump woman who insisted on dressing like a tall willowy one. It was a strange vanity for somebody who was, on the whole, entirely free of vanities of any sort.

‘So they gave you a grilling, did they?’ she asked, rescuing the dampening sleeve of her robe from its place on the table. ‘Did they fingerprint you? Don’t try to spare your feelings: just tell me every humiliating detail.’

‘Fingerprints, yes, as a routine precaution. But not a grilling, Elsie, far from it. It is clear that I am not in any sense a suspect. In addition to identifying the body, they merely wished me to confirm where I had been over the past four days.’

‘And …?’

‘You know perfectly well. I was in France until the day before the body was found.’

‘So let’s get this straight,’ said Elsie. ‘We are being asked to believe that your wife—’

‘Ex-wife.’

‘—drove to West Wittering, either to fake a suicide or genuinely kill herself. She then walked away from the car, done up to the nines, and just happened to run into the Cissbury Strangler on her way out of the car park. Or bleeding what?’

‘The balance of probabilities,’ I said, ‘would seem to favour “or bleeding what”.’

Visitors to West Wittering wore shorts and T-shirts in the summer, Barbours and Hunter wellies in the winter. As long as it was not actually snowing, they carried cool boxes and buckets and spades. Preferably they had dogs. Even when inspecting the body, it had struck me how incongruous it would have been for Geraldine or anyone else to have left the car park at West Wittering beach dressed in a red jacket and skirt and red high-heeled shoes. She could not have failed to be noticed as she walked back down the long, straight and open approach road into the village. She would have been an utterly dog-less, red, Italian beacon in a world of English greens and browns. And nobody had as yet come forward, it seemed, to report a sighting.

‘So,’ said Elsie, ‘was she killed somewhere else and her car left at West Wittering with a note written by the killer?’

‘Possible,’ I said.

‘But the note was on her own paper. Which means that the murderer must have known her well enough at least to get hold of it.’

‘Perhaps the paper was already in the car,’ I suggested.

‘What for?’

‘How should I know? A shopping list, perhaps.’

‘It had the top torn off,’ mused Elsie.

‘That need not be significant,’ I said. ‘It was just a bit of scrap paper that happened to be available. I know a red herring when I see one. Trust me. I’m a hack writer.’

Elsie considered this point and nodded several times more than I felt was strictly necessary. ‘All right then, what about this? She was planning to run off with somebody else. He picked her up from the car park – or even left the car and the note there with her knowledge. Then he double-crossed her. Lured her up to Cissbury Ring and strangled her.’

‘Why should he, when he could have drowned her at West Wittering much more convincingly?’ I asked, half facetiously. But Elsie seemed to take this objection equally seriously.

‘Maybe they fell out later over the division of the loot? Maybe he discovered that she was going to double-cross him?’

I could well believe that double-crossing on this scale had always been a regular part of the home life of my dear ex-(now officially late) wife. But I just said, ‘Don’t you think that this is getting a little far-fetched?’

‘Why do you keep raising all of these objections?’ Elsie demanded. Nobody did narrowed eyes quite like her.

‘Because this is not a problem for us to solve. The police are already working on it. They have road blocks out there at this moment, questioning people going up to Cissbury Ring. They are going through databases of known criminals. They’re out fingerprinting the sheep for all I know. How can we compete with that, sitting in a pub with no chocolate?’

‘What would Fairfax say if he heard you now?’

‘He’d say quite right too. Fairfax has no time for amateur sleuths or for any policeman with less than thirty years’ experience.’

‘But just think if we solved this ahead of the Old Bill. Think what a book it would make.’

‘Who is this “we” of whom you so glibly speak? Don’t jump from the first person singular to the first person plural without checking there are at least two people with a desire to do some amateur sleuthing. From where I’m sitting, I can count only one – unless you are planning to join forces with Rupert. He also mentioned the word “we” in a similar connection, as I recall.’

‘Oh, come on … Ethelred … Red … Reddy Baby … I could be your apprentice. Please.’

Hard-nosed and foul of tongue though Elsie might be under most circumstances, there was a distinct little-girly side to her – at least when it stood a better chance of success than other means.

‘Elsie, no.’

‘What if I said “pretty please”?’

‘I would not recommend it as a course of action likely to be successful.’

‘Oh, all right. But let’s just take a stroll up to Cissbury Ring, shall we? I could do with some exercise. Drink up, Tressider. You’re going walkies.’

So, there it was. When pleading failed, she could always revert to ordering me around.

The route from the Gun Inn to Cissbury Ring lies first along a road lined with low, bricky suburban bungalows, then skirts Nepcote Green’s willows and pretty flint cottages before climbing gradually but unrelentingly towards the broad skies and sheep-nibbled turf of the downs. When the road stops at the National Trust car park, the real scramble up to the iron-age fort begins.

Elsie, whose training for events of this sort consisted of an evening in front of the television with a large box of Thornton’s Continental Selection, puffed a little as we climbed the last few steps and stood on the grassy rampart. The wind flapped against her unsuitable but undoubtedly fashionable robe. None of this however, for the moment, seemed to disconcert her.

Sussex was rolled out before us, in every possible shade of green and brown, sweeping from one misty horizon to the other. Cloud shadows drifted over the rounded chalk escarpments and dipped capriciously in and out of dry valleys. In this vastness of earth and sky the works of man seemed insignificant pinpricks. Here and there the slopes were dotted with tiny white sheep. In a field below, what appeared to be a toy tractor chugged backwards and forwards, harrowing or drilling or gleaning or whatever one does in a tractor in the autumn. The idea that it might have been a child’s toy was accentuated by its bright primary colours – blue, red, yellow – in a landscape of leaf and earth. The thought of Geraldine on her (alleged) long walk away from West Wittering car park again flashed briefly in front of me.

The September air had as yet no trace of winter’s hardness and the smell of the warm damp soil wafted up to us from the newly ploughed fields. Summer was still giving way reluctantly to autumn. The harvest was in. Soon leaves would start to dry, redden and fall. It was a scene to inspire anyone with poetic thoughts.

‘Well, one thing’s sodding well certain,’ said Elsie. ‘Your missus was done in up here. Nobody would drag a body up a slope like that.’

‘There might have been a gang of them,’ I reminded her mischievously. ‘The robber band dividing the loot amongst themselves by moonlight.’

‘Bloody hell, Tressider. Do get a grip,’ said Elsie. ‘Now, let’s see if we can find out where the body was discovered.’

This too seemed unlikely, but on the flat ground in the centre of the ring we found small pieces of blue-and-white plastic tape hanging from a bush, indicating that the police had recently cordoned the area off. It was in one of the many rough, bramble-filled depressions that pockmark the site – old flint workings that pre-date even the construction of the earth ramparts. Originally they would have been thirty foot deep or more, but now they offer at best only a temporary hiding place for an unwanted corpse.

‘Not where
I
would choose to hide a body if I wanted it to stay hidden,’ said Elsie, echoing my own thoughts. ‘But good enough for a day or two while you put a few miles between yourself and the West Sussex Police.’

‘So you don’t think that it was planned?’

‘Spur-of-the-moment job, in my opinion.’ She puffed out her chest as she said it. She was getting into being a herring seller’s apprentice.

‘Meaning?’

‘There can be no doubt that your wife was planning to do a runner with other people’s cash. Before she could make her getaway somebody stopped her, killed her, took the bunce – and all of her ID – and left the body here. The business of the car at West Wittering is a red herring that somebody has planted to throw us off the scent. Mark my words.’

‘I see,’ I smiled. ‘So, you think that in real life criminals have the leisure to plant red herrings?’

‘All right, I’m no more certain than you are; but don’t try to adopt that bloody superior tone with me, Ethelred Tressider, until you’re selling over ten thousand copies in hardback. Until then I’m as entitled to my views as you are. Now, let’s list the suspects.’ She deposited her round little body on a bench, and pointedly ignored the splendid view that lay in front of her and below her. ‘There’s Rupert, obviously, the dumped boyfriend. There’s Elizabeth, dumped wife of the afore-mentioned chinless loser, equally obviously. You say that Charlotte was also not exactly on good terms with her sister, so we add her to the list. Then there’s Mr X.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Whoever she was planning to do a runner with. There must have been somebody.’

‘Why?’

‘Jesus! Which of us is the sodding crime writer? Because Geraldine never dumped one man before she had moved on to the next. If she got rid of Rupert, it figures that there was somebody else.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Get real, Ethelred … please? In case you have forgotten, your ex-wife was a Grade One Listed slut. She was a floozy of architectural and historic importance. This is a simple case of
cherchez le bloke.
Identify Mr X and the case is halfway to being solved.’

‘Geraldine isn’t … wasn’t … like that,’ I said. ‘She might sometimes have given the impression … but you never really knew her.’

‘I knew her well enough. How many men do you think she’d had affairs with before she finally left you for that idiot?’

‘Affairs? None at all,’ I said. ‘It was just Rupert.’

Elsie shook her head sadly, then suddenly stood up and smoothed down the front of her robe with a quick movement of her palms. ‘If that’s what you want to believe, Ethelred.’ For a moment she looked at me almost tenderly – goodness knows why. Then she rubbed her hands together. ‘Now, what time does that village post office close? I have an appointment with a half-pound bar of Cadbury’s finest hazelnut.’

And we set off, each lost in our own thoughts, down the hill, then onwards to the post office and (for one of us at least) the absolute certainty of chocolate.

My fear is not that I shall one day look back on the last half-dozen years as dreary and utterly wasted. My fear is that one day I shall look back on them as the best days of my life.

But of course, it could be, and has been, much worse. Much worse. When Geraldine walked out on me, one of the many things that friends said to comfort me was that two people as selfish and self-centred as her and Rupert would never be able to stay together for long. This proved, by modern standards at least, to be somewhat wide of the mark. They remained together for just over ten years. But even at the beginning, I could have told my well-meaning comforters that they were wrong.

Though Rupert appeared, on casual inspection, to be utterly tied up in Rupert, his selfishness was of a studied and, ultimately, totally artificial kind – a mere facade. ‘Mere’ however does not do justice to the facade that Rupert created over the years. It was a facade of such depth, a facade with so much apparent solidarity, that those who knew him only casually frequently mistook it for the real thing.

Once one had penetrated a layer or two of this remarkable edifice, he could be disarmingly honest about its construction. Rupert on one occasion said to me, ‘For every affectation I have, I can date precisely, sometimes to the minute, when I acquired it and who I acquired it from. Some of my secondary mannerisms are taken from literature, but I like to work directly from nature if possible. Take the way I write the letter P, for example – that was copied from somebody at prep school, whom I greatly admired at the time. I never liked his Bs, however, which are from another source entirely. Many of my very best mannerisms are from my old Latin master, who had once been in the West African colonial service. It may look pretty easy to be me, but I can assure you that you have to work like a black to do it properly.’

From which real or imaginary person he had copied the air of self-centredness, I never did find out, but it was no more than the first outer layer of the pseudo-Rupert, and most people who knew him penetrated it quite early on. Though Rupert was undeniably quite capable of using people to achieve his ends, he could also show surprising generosity. He would lend people money, his clothes, his car, with quite genuine unconcern for their ultimate return. To lend Geraldine £200,000 – if he had it – would have been an extreme example of this trait, but no more than that. Though it was unclear where Rupert would have laid his hands on that type of money, it never occurred to me, in the days and months that followed, to question even once the veracity of his claim. It was part of the pattern. In his way he genuinely cared about people. After his failure to ask me to be his best man he quickly compensated for this lapse by assuring me that I would be godfather to his and Elizabeth’s first child. That they chose not to have children did not lessen, in his eyes or mine, the honour that he was trying to bestow on me.