The Herring in the Library (4 page)

‘Robert is delayed for a moment,’ Annabelle said, pouring our drinks. She glanced towards the door, then added absentmindedly: ‘I think you said you would like a lemonade,
Elise?’

‘You are so very kind,’ said ‘Elise’ in a strangely simpering tone that put me on my guard at once.

‘And a whisky for you, Ethelred.’

I took the heavy lead crystal in my hand. The whisky seemed a long way down at the bottom, but it was a large glass.

‘It’s so airy in here,’ I said, looking at the evening light reflected off the glossy palm fronds.

‘It makes a change from the oak panelling in the rest of the house,’ said Annabelle with a smile.

‘You’re not into oak panelling, then, Annabelle?’ Elsie piped up from just behind my shoulder.

‘It’s all Grade One listed,’ said Annabelle regretfully. ‘There’s not much we can do about it.’

‘You could do white emulsion,’ said Elsie. ‘Or magnolia. You’d need more than one coat, of course. It’s on special offer at B&Q at the moment.’

Annabelle gave me a tight-lipped scowl. Then she looked away and said: ‘It really is too rude of Robert not to be here. I’m going to chase him out of wherever he is.’

She swished from the room, leaving Elsie and me alone.

‘Could you get your eyes to stop following her every movement like some lovesick puppy?’ said Elsie. ‘Just for a moment, at least? And could you kindly kick her hard every time
she calls me “Elise”?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

‘Yes, you do. Who does she remind you of?’

‘Annabelle? She reminds me of nobody in particular.’

‘I’ll give you a clue: it’s the unprincipled slapper you were formerly married to. Would you like to make a guess now?’

‘Annabelle’s not a bit like Geraldine.’

‘She’s a tad taller, I’ll grant you. She’s definitely not a real blonde and my hunch is those aren’t the tits that God gave her. But I do know an unprincipled
slapper when I see one. Steer clear of her unless you have authority from me in writing. In which lap-dancing establishment did your friend Shagger pick her up?’

‘I don’t know where Sir Robert and Lady Muntham met,’ I said. ‘By the way,
please
don’t address him as Shagger and
please
don’t suggest to
anyone else they met in a lap-dancing club.’

Elsie smiled. She may have intended it as an enigmatic smile, but it failed to conceal the general shape of her plan.

‘Whatever,’ I said. There are some people you can’t trust to behave themselves at dinner parties once they’ve had a few drinks. I didn’t trust Elsie even on
lemonade, but I also knew there was nothing I could do about it.

‘The hall, the conservatory, the billiard room,’ said Elsie contemplatively.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘This isn’t a dinner party – we’re back playing
Cluedo.’

‘Only if one of us gets murdered,’ I said with a confident smile. ‘How likely do you think that is?’

‘It’s the host that gets murdered in
Cluedo,
so it’s only Shagger who’s got any worries. Do you think that’s why he’s not here? The former lap
dancer’s already bumped him off?’

‘I am sure Robert will be with us soon,’ I said. ‘Anyway, if this was
Cluedo,
there should be a piece of lead piping on the floor over there. It’s about half the
size of the conservatory, if I remember the board correctly, so we wouldn’t miss it.’

‘What do you think a place like this costs?’ asked Elsie, changing the subject.

‘Millions to buy. Tens of thousands a year to run. Robert says they have a full-time gardener and an assistant, plus a housekeeper and a cleaner who comes in for a few hours every day.
That’s before you start repairing the roof or dealing with the death-watch beetle.’

‘So, he must have a penny or two then, your banker friend?’

‘I guess so.’

A noise behind us made us turn, but it was not Robert or Annabelle.

‘The door was open, so we came in,’ said the man. Annabelle said we’d be having drinks in the conservatory first, so we’ve been hunting for a room that looked like a
conservatory or at least had drinks in it.’

‘This will do, anyway,’ said the woman, looking round the room.

‘Closest we’ve got so far,’ said the man.

They were both of middle height and nominally dressed for the occasion, he in a slightly scruffy white dinner jacket, she in a long red dress with a black stole draped loosely round her
shoulders. Perhaps it was the newcomer’s self-assurance, or perhaps it was the palm trees that surrounded us on all sides, but just for a moment I regretted that I had not thought of wearing
a white dinner jacket myself.

Evening dress makes some people stiff and formal; the man seemed to wear his like an old pair of jeans and a sweater. He still had the air of a naughty schoolboy about him – a naughty
schoolboy who has little fear of being caught. Since his hair was showing signs of grey, he’d probably been a naughty schoolboy for some years and was now fairly good at it. He went straight
over to the well-stocked side table and uncorked a bottle of sherry. ‘Will this one do?’

‘No sign of champagne?’ asked the woman.

‘Wouldn’t know where to start looking in this jungle. We don’t know our way round here yet, do we, Fi? We’ll know next time, if they ever invite us back.’

‘Probably the champagne will be rubbish anyway. Do you remember the stuff they served up last time in Chelsea?’

‘Spanish, wasn’t it?’

‘Bulgarian actually. Is that sherry medium dry?’

‘It says medium dry on the bottle, but they always lie. Probably tastes like gripe water.’

‘Any half-decent white wine?’

‘None available to the general public. It’s just the stuff Annabelle has set out on this table.’

‘I’ll risk the sherry then,’ she said. I noticed that the black stole had a large cigarette burn in it. She could have turned the stole the other way, but she hadn’t
bothered.

The man poured a large sherry and gave it a quick and not altogether approving sniff before handing it on.

‘You two OK for drinks?’ he asked, as he returned to the whisky decanter. ‘No waiting staff tonight it would seem. Sorry – we’re Colin and Fiona McIntosh. Friends
of the Munthams, but clearly not such close friends as to rate being met or greeted it would seem. We’re used to it.’

‘They’ll be having their usual pre-dinner row,’ said Fiona. She sipped the sherry and pulled a face. ‘Better to get it over with beforehand. You’ll find
they’re quite good hosts once they get to focus on you properly. Who are you, by the way? With the state of security here at the moment I guess there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re
axe-murders or something. Is that what you are?’

‘He prefers poison,’ said Elsie. ‘Though he’s used most methods at some stage.’

‘I write crime novels,’ I said quickly.

‘Would I have heard of you?’ asked Fiona.

‘No,’ I said. (Better to get that one over with too.)

I introduced myself and Elsie, and we all shook hands the necessary four times.

‘You’ve known the Munthams for a while then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Fiona. ‘In assorted configurations. It was Robert and Harriet, when we first met – and Miles and Annabelle, of course, as a separate but not too thriving
operation.’

‘Then it was Robert and Madge for a bit,’ said Colin. ‘Not sure what happened to Madge. Probably came to a bad end, like Jonah Jarvis.’

‘That was when Annabelle was with . . .’

‘Will? David? No, I can’t remember either,’ said Colin. ‘Anyway, we have known them jointly and severally for a while.’

‘But nothing changes,’ said Fiona.

‘No, nothing changes,’ said Colin. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time Robert had invited us over and then failed to show up at all.’

As if on cue, Robert burst into the room to greet us, with Annabelle and another slightly dejected-looking guest in tow. Robert apologized profusely but said that he had been talking to Clive
(the random dejected guest, I assumed) about business and had not noticed the time. Annabelle did not seem exactly happy, but there was clearly at least a temporary truce.

I looked at Elsie and realized, with a sinking heart, that she had probably not forgotten that she had been forbidden to address people as ‘Shagger’.

Elsie held out her hand. She smiled sweetly. ‘Good to meet you, Sh . . . ame we missed you when we arrived.’

‘Yes, sorry about that,’ said Robert. He seemed unaware that Elsie’s stutter was a newly acquired disability.

‘Well, Sh . . . all we get a chance to view this place later?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

‘Sh . . . uper!’ said Elsie, giving up any pretence of subtlety. She gave me a grin. I glared at her but she had already lost interest in that particular game and was now engaged in
a conversation with Colin and Fiona.

‘So, what do
you
do?’ I heard her say.

‘I’m a doctor,’ I heard Colin reply.

‘I meant to say,’ said Annabelle, touching my arm lightly. ‘This is going to be something of a literary gathering. We have another writer coming this evening. Felicity Hooper.
Do you know her?’

There is this charming belief that we writers all know each other – possibly through Society of Authors sherry parties or evenings of debauchery at Hay-on-Wye. I know a lot of crime
writers, of course, but for a moment I couldn’t quite place Felicity Hooper.

‘What sort of thing does she write?’ I asked.

‘Family sagas,’ said Annabelle.

‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ Not crime at all, and a lot more successful than I have ever been.

‘Felicity Hooper?’ asked Fiona, overhearing this last remark. ‘Yes, that’s right, family sagas with an uplifting theme: plucky heroine winning through in the foreground,
God playing a minor supporting role in the background. As a man, He’s lucky to get off that lightly. The men in her novels tend to be evil schemers or morons.’

‘I know her. She sent a manuscript to me once,’ said Elsie grimly.

‘Not literary enough for you?’ asked Fiona.

‘Didn’t think I’d make enough money,’ said Elsie, reaching for a peanut from the small bowl on a side table. ‘I was well wrong there. Though I also objected to
being lectured to chapter by chapter on the need for courage and cheerful resourcefulness. Stuff that.’

At which point, I was introduced to Clive, and so I never learned the identity of the ‘stuck-up, sanctimonious cow’ whom Elsie was now discussing with Colin and Fiona. Still, once
Elsie got going, it could have been almost anyone.

Clive seemed slightly distracted – irritated almost – by something that had happened earlier and asked what I did twice without apparently realizing it. The second time he registered
my answer sufficiently to reply: ‘I can’t say I read a lot of crime myself.’ Our conversation lapsed into silence several times, but this did not seem to trouble him very much.
There were clearly other things on his mind – money perhaps. He had the air of having once been more prosperous than he was now. His dinner jacket was undoubtedly smarter than Colin
McIntosh’s, though it too could have benefited from a trip to the dry cleaners. The cuffs of his dress shirt were slightly frayed. He proved to be a former banking colleague of
Robert’s.

‘It was pretty ungrateful of the bank to do that to him,’ said Clive, suddenly breaking one of our conversational pauses.

‘I thought Robert had just retired?’ I asked. ‘He said he didn’t want to linger.’

‘When they sack you, you get thirty minutes to fill your cardboard box and go,’ said Clive. ‘If you linger they call security.’

‘Well, it doesn’t look as though he needs to work,’ I said, indicating the grandeur around us.

‘I would have thought you needed to work all the more if you had a place like this to keep up,’ said Clive. ‘But the bank may have been more generous with the severance package
than I thought. It wasn’t that generous with me.’

‘You left at the same time?’

‘Pretty much. I’m a school bursar these days, which almost pays the bills. Maybe I should be thankful I’m not still a banker.’

I grimaced in return. That year bankers were being blamed for everything that was wrong with the economy, and their greed had become the yardstick by which all vices were measured. It was safer
that year to admit to having the Black Death than to being a banker.

‘Robert thought he knew of one or two good openings for me,’ Clive continued. ‘That’s what we had been talking about.’

I was trying to think of anything encouraging to say, when all conversation in the room was brought to an abrupt halt.

‘So, this is where you all are!’ exclaimed an indignant voice from the doorway. A middle-aged lady in a rather old-fashioned frock of indeterminate colour stood on the threshold, her
finger pointing accusingly at Robert – though we all immediately felt a strange sense of guilt.

‘Felicity!’ exclaimed Annabelle. ‘How lovely to see you. But was there nobody to let you in?’

‘
Anyone
can come
in,’
said Felicity. ‘The place is wide open. But there is nobody to
tell you where to go.
You could wander the corridors here for ever.
You really are the most inconsiderate host, Robert.’

Robert just grinned broadly and said: ‘Gin and tonic?’

‘A very large one might make up
a little
for what I have suffered. I hope the cooking tonight is going to be better than the butlering.’

‘Not much Christian forgiveness there,’ Elsie said in a whisper, though possibly not enough of a whisper because Felicity immediately looked in her direction.

Annabelle took charge of Felicity, as one does with a guest that one wishes to dispose of safely and quickly. With a firm hand on Felicity’s upper arm, she headed determinedly in my
direction. I found myself formally introduced to Felicity as briefly as could be decently done. Annabelle took Clive Brent and manhandled him away to be introduced, presumably, to more interesting
people.

Felicity Hooper and I sized each other up for a moment. I decided her face was vaguely familiar, and for a moment there was a half-expectant look on her part – the look you give somebody
who ought to recognize you, but hasn’t. So perhaps we had coincided at one of the smaller literary festivals. Luton? I’d find out sooner or later.