The Herring in the Library (6 page)

So, it wasn’t that dull an evening after all – dagger in the ballroom was my best guess at that point, which shows how wrong even I can be sometimes.

Of course, there were things we should have spotted even at that stage, but Ethelred is not the most observant of people, as you will have already gathered from his narrative.
Later – much later – back in his flat, I was able to fill him in on a number of things as I replayed the events of the evening.

Let’s take you back an hour or two . . .

Ethelred kindly drove me to Muntham Court. I tried to dissuade him, but he insisted. He obviously didn’t want me to ruin a perfectly good pair of Manolos just to get a
breath of country air – Manolos being expensive and the other thing pretty widely available.

Chez Muntham proved to be one of these pseudo-olde-worlde joints that were put up by the Victorians and that nobody has had time to knock down yet. It had probably had a lucky
escape in the fifties or early sixties, when people of taste went around with sledge-hammers and wrecking balls. Muntham Court (I do wish to be fair as always) was reasonably big – but there
wasn’t much else to compensate for its being in the middle of nowhere. It was the sort of place you could get bored in pretty quickly-unless you happened to have the sort of gardener that
they did. I caught a glimpse of him, wearing no shirt, but with much else to commend him, wheeling a barrow of garden stuff (don’t expect me to be more specific) off into the distance. I
wondered whether I could find an excuse to take a turn round the grounds later. I could always carry my shoes and/or get them covered with mud, if it was a good enough cause.

There was a large green car already parked in front of the house, but we appeared to be amongst the first to arrive. We were immediately greeted by some slapper in a blue dress,
who had clearly never come across the expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ – though I thought I might usefully acquaint her with the phrase as the evening went by. She certainly
didn’t look like somebody who’d have a husband called ‘Shagger’.

‘Ethelred,’ said Mrs Shagger, latching onto him as if he were a two-for-one offer at Lidl. ‘It’s so sweet of you to come. And this must be
Elise?’

I am not, and have no plans to be, any type of Elise. I mentioned this in passing.

‘Elsie, of course,’ said the slapper. ‘And you must call me Annabelle.’

She smiled in a way that threatened to crack her make-up, rock solid though it was, and we proceeded through a number of large and unnecessary rooms into a refuge for moth-eaten
palm trees. It was set out for drinks, but we were the only drinkers so far. Well, it was still early doors.

‘Now, Elise . . .’

‘Elsie.’

‘. . . a spot of champagne?’

‘Lemonade,’ I said. I do sometimes drink champagne, but not the cheap stuff I reckoned might be on offer.

‘And you, Ethelred?’

The way he’d been looking at her since he came in, I would have thought anything served up in a doggy bowl would have been fine with Ethelred, as long as it came from her
fair hands and was accompanied by a pat on the head and a scratch behind the ears.

‘Whisky, please, Annabelle,’ he simpered. There was a real and present danger that he was going to roll over on the floor to have his tummy tickled.

She used the drink order as an excuse to manhandle him again. ‘You boys and your whisky’ she said, giving his arm an affectionate squeeze.

Drinks were served while Annabelle apologized for Shagger’s absence and I offered a little helpful advice on interior decoration. She took it well, I thought. When she had
gone, I offered Ethelred advice of a more general nature.

‘Could you get your eyes to stop following her every movement like some lovesick puppy? 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,’ he said.

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

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

Of course, Ethelred’s problem was that he’d been married to Geraldine for years, without discovering anything important about her–like the names and addresses of her
various lovers, for example.

This took us onto the subject of Mr and Mrs Shagger (as Ethelred was keen I should not address them). I’ve given up trying to work out why people end up married to other
people, other than to guess that it’s done by some rather vindictive random number generator. Based on my other friends, they were no more unlikely a combination than most and, to be fair, at
that point my knowledge of Shagger himself was limited to what Ethelred had told me. But why would any sensible man hitch up with a blatant gold-digger, ten years younger than himself, with long
legs and a surgically enhanced chest? If I ever meet a sensible man, I’m going to ask him, but in the meantime it will have to remain a mystery.

It was round about that point that Colin and Fiona McIntosh arrived. I have to say that I took an instant liking to them. Neither of them looked as though they had spent more
than five minutes getting ready for the evening’s bash – including locating the dinner jacket at the bottom of the wardrobe and the dress trousers (for all I know) in the garden shed.
They rubbished their hosts’ champagne, confirming my suspicions, and then helped themselves to anything liquid they could find in the largest glasses on the premises. They were good people,
though they too did not quite match my image of Sir Shagger Muntham, the eminent financier, and his circle.

Fortunately Shagger himself now made an appearance. My immediate impression was of somebody who had spent many years dining well and might now have an inkling that the bill was
on its way. He was tall, a bit like Ethelred; but (though I wasn’t planning to tell any crime writers this) he looked about ten years older than Ethelred, which didn’t quite fit with
their being drinking buddies at university. Either Shagger had been an old undergraduate, or he’d packed in a few extra years somehow since graduating. He also seemed to have lost weight, but
not in a good way. His evening dress – smart enough in other respects, with impeccable creases in the trousers – just seemed a touch loose on him. His cheeks were just a trifle sunken. He was
just a bit listless. I don’t know if you read much poetry but, frankly, if you had put him beside a lake from which the sedge had recently withered, he’d have been a dead ringer for
Keats’s palely loitering knight-at-arms-and – that guy as you’ll be aware, was deeply in the shit. No, Shagger didn’t look a well man. Maybe it was simply that Mrs Shagger
had put him on a diet. I’ve sometimes thought I might like to lose the odd pound or two myself, but not at that sort of cost.

He had with him (other than his wife, who did not look happy) a rather hunky individual named Clive. Though his hair was distinctly thinning, he still had more than a little
youthful charm. Clive remained somewhat in the background as we all introduced ourselves.

I remembered that I was not to address Sir Robert as ‘Shagger’. ‘Good to meet you,’ I said. ‘Shame we missed you when we arrived.’

‘Yes, sorry about that,’ said Shagger.

I asked whether we would get a chance to look round the joint later. Shagger thought we might, though he was not to know under what circumstances and roughly how dead he would
be at the time.

I said I thought that would be super.

I turned to Colin and Fiona and established he was a doctor – Shagger’s own doctor, as it happened.

‘He doesn’t look well to me,’ I said.

Colin smiled, as if to say that wasn’t something he could discuss with a total stranger, which (or are doctors taught how to double bluff?) probably meant it was pretty
damned serious.

Fiona turned out to be a surgeon, making them one of these all-medical couples that you run into from time to time.

Then a familiar name was mentioned off to my right.

‘Felicity Hooper?’ asked Fiona, overhearing the same remark.

Ah, yes, I thought, Felicity Hooper – successful novelist but not represented by me in anyway, shape or form. Years ago I had sent her a brief letter to let her know that,
much though I loved the manuscript that she had chosen to share with me, I did not feel able to devote sufficient time at present to placing her novel and that possibly she might be better
represented by some other etc. etc. etc. The reason I remembered Hooper was that she was one of those people who fail to spot an outright rejection and write back to explain why you and they are
soulmates. It was on the fourth attempt that I finally shook her off, by which time I was explaining myself much more clearly. I’m told that one of her later books featured an obnoxious
midget literary agent called Elise. Fair enough: it’s a crap name, as I’ve already said.

The McIntoshes had never read any of Felicity Hooper’s books. I proceeded to rubbish them, even though I’d only read the first half of the first one. As an agent you
are permitted to do this.

I was just getting nicely into my stride when we were interrupted. ‘So, this is where you all are!’ exclaimed a frumpy individual standing by the door. Not everyone
has my dress sense, of course, but this dame had either gone to her mother’s wardrobe by mistake or thought that this was a fancy dress party. I sniffed the air but unexpectedly could not
detect the odour of mothballs. I could have given her a few helpful tips on the fashion front. In spite of her blatant lack of dress sense the party seemed cowed rather than amused – possibly
because it had taken no more than ten seconds for her to make it clear she looked down on everyone in the room. It was interesting to see how Mrs Shagger immediately sucked up to her.
‘Felicity! How lovely to see you,’ she said. (She did not speak for most of us in this respect.)

So, this was Felicity Hooper, then. The newcomer at this point launched into a general tirade about other people’s bad manners, not greeting people at the door, lack of
security, allowing terrorists to roam unchecked around the conservatory, hall and library, where we could all be murdered with daggers, ropes, lead piping etc.

Shagger shut her up with gin (it’s not just babies you can feed it to) and her complaints were reduced by a few decibels. Annabelle then grabbed her firmly and disposed of
her by introducing her to Ethelred – a mean trick, but I’d have done the same. I saw him grimace and heard him politely enquire after her sales figures.

‘So, do you live round here?’ I asked the McIntoshes, who had refilled their glasses fairly lavishly under cover of Hooper’s entrance.

‘No, we drove down from Clapham,’ said Colin. ‘This is our first visit to Findon. The invitation came a bit out of the blue, really. We were supposed to be at
a College of Surgeons’ dinner tonight, but we thought it would be more fun to see Robert pretending to be lord of the manor.’

‘They fill your glass a bit more often at the RCS,’ muttered Fiona.

‘Say what you like about surgeons,’ said Colin, ‘but they do still know how to drink.’

‘So did Robert before he married
her
,’ said Fiona. ‘I hope Robert’s looking after the wine at dinner – both in terms of the quality and the
quantity.’

‘Do you think he’s got any money left for wine after buying this place?’ asked Colin.

It was at this point that the last couple arrived. In the ensuing introductions, and reshuffling of the pack of guests, I found myself back with Ethelred and La Hooper. She was
complaining about crime in general.

‘It merely shows,’ she said, ‘what a ridiculous genre crime is. It is exactly like
Cluedo.
Six or seven stock suspects, all with a motive and,
strangely, an opportunity. Then you put them all together in a country house somewhere, with a convenient excuse as to why the police cannot investigate the murder themselves.’

That is, obviously, fair comment, but not the sort of thing you should say to a crime writer, unless you are their agent and contractually obliged to be ruthlessly honest.
Hooper was being unpleasant on a purely amateur basis, which I rather resented. I suddenly realized who it would be good to see murdered tonight, though the chances of it actually happening were
quite slim.

Ethelred in the meantime was defending crime writers in general. He wasn’t making too good a job of it, so I introduced myself, just to see if La Hooper remembered me.

‘Elsie Thirkettle. Literary agent. I turned down your first book. It was crap.’ Well, that should give her a clue.

Then they did this gong thing to tell us dinner was ready in some remote corner of the house. And, each with our own thoughts on the evening so far, we all set off on our
expedition to find the dining room.

Annabelle had sat me next to Robert at one end of the table. Ethelred was at the far end, next to the gold-digger herself. ‘I don’t think we’ve been
introduced yet,’ I said to the man on my left, as soup was randomly allocated to guests by the village idiot in a borrowed jacket.

My neighbour was giving his full attention to protecting his trousers but he found time to reply: ‘Gerald Smith. Blast.’

I offered him my napkin to mop up some of the soup that was now such a noticeable feature of his evening wear. He dabbed silently at his cuff for a bit and then glanced quickly
up the table to check that the soup man was not on his way back. Gerald didn’t look like somebody who could take a joke, especially one that entailed being served soup by a comedy waiter. So
it wasn’t really his sort of evening.

‘I’m Robert’s solicitor,’ Gerald said eventually. ‘And you are . . .’

‘Elsie Thirkettle,’ I said. ‘Agent to the writer of fine but underrated literature seated at the other end of the table and currently talking to your
wife.’

‘She’ll be filling him in on Scott, no doubt,’ said Gerald, without enthusiasm.

‘Sir Walter?’

‘No, our son Scott. He’s just eighteen months.’

‘And doubtless has his father’s nose, his mother’s eyes and soon.’ I’m not really into juveniles, but I know that this is what parents like to hear
– doubtless it reassures the fathers no end.

‘It would be surprising if he had,’ said Gerald. ‘He’s adopted, you see. Jane wasn’t able . . . we weren’t able to have children of our own. So,
in the end, we adopted. Scott.’