The Herring in the Library (8 page)

‘Let Colin in,’ she said, relinquishing my hand and heading towards Robert.

The door was not in fact locked, but was bolted at the top and bottom. The bolts were stiff and it took me a few seconds to push them back. Once I did, and the door had swung open, the rest of
the dinner party surged past me. At the same moment I heard Annabelle behind me give a gasp and turned to see her, white-faced, looking helplessly in my direction. I looked again at Robert and now
saw what had been odd about his neck. A thin cord had been wound several times around it and then tightened by means of a pencil, inserted into the cord and twisted. Fortunately at this point Colin
and Fiona took over. Fiona untied the ligature and together they lowered Robert to the floor. Colin checked Robert’s pulse, then listened to his chest.

‘No signs of life at all,’ he muttered. ‘How long since we called for the ambulance?’

‘Two or three minutes,’ said Fiona.

‘How long do you think he’s been lying here?’

‘Ten minutes? Could be twenty – absolute max.’ They looked at each other doubtfully.

‘If it’s twenty . . . shit . . . OK, we’ll try CPR anyway,’ said Colin.

But even before the ambulance arrived, it was clear that this was going to be a murder inquiry. If any guests had plans to go home early, they were going to have to cancel them.

The police interviewed us one by one. While awaiting our turn, I sat in one corner of the conservatory with Elsie. She had consented on this occasion to drink brandy.

‘How’s Lady Muntham taking it?’ she asked. That she did not call her Mrs Shagger spoke volumes. We were all in a state of shock.

‘Clive Brent and the McIntoshes are looking after her,’ I said. ‘I think Colin’s given her a sedative.’

Elsie nodded. ‘It’s all a bit of a puzzle though, isn’t it?’

‘That’s what I was thinking. The door was very firmly bolted. I had to break a window to get in. It would have been easy enough for a murderer to get into Muntham Court – doors
have been wide open most of the evening. Somebody could have hidden until Robert went to the library and then gone in after him. But how did they lock everything up afterwards? It’s a classic
puzzle – a man dead in a locked room.’

‘And the answer is?’

‘Suicide or a very ingenious murderer,’ I said.

‘Not suicide,’ said Elsie. ‘You can’t strangle yourself. You’d pass out before you could do any permanent damage. It has to be murder and it has to be one of the
guests. I reckon there must have been fifteen to twenty minutes between Robert leaving the room and our finding the body. During that time Annabelle, the Hooper woman and the Smiths left the room
for five minutes or so. I think Fiona McIntosh did as well. Clive Brent claims he got lost during the tour. Then both McIntoshes were out of sight of the main party for a while.’

‘I’d be careful what you say to the police,’ I said. ‘I think you’ll find they’d prefer you to stick to the facts. All we know is that Robert was found
strangled in a locked room. And, as for it being one of the guests, it would have been very easy for anybody to break in while we were at dinner . . .’

By the time the police got to me, they had already put together an account of the evening and I could add almost nothing to what they knew. Early on, we had all agreed, it would have been
straightforward for an intruder to enter Muntham Court and hide in the library or close by. Doors and windows had been left open with staggering generosity. Robert’s speech, with hindsight,
was regarded by everyone as a little odd, but nobody could put their finger on why. The time between Robert leaving the room and the discovery of the body was adequate for a killer to strike.
Meanwhile, all of the guests had been out of sight of the others at least briefly. In addition to the guests, there had been two members of staff at Muntham Court that evening. Diana Michie, the
house-keeper, had been in the kitchen. The idiot boy proved to be called Dave Peart. He was precisely what he had appeared to be – the assistant gardener, pressed into service as a kitchen
assistant and waiter. The gardener himself, John O’Brian, had been working late, but had not been seen inside the house by anyone – when the police arrived he had already gone home,
apparently unaware that anything unusual had happened. Gillian Maggs, the cleaner, had finished her work that afternoon and had left hours before the guests arrived. That might have given the
police some sort of shortlist but, bearing in mind the general level of security at Muntham Court, half the population of Sussex (East and West) had had the opportunity to murder Robert. The
problem was how any of them – guests, staff or casual intruders – could have got out of a room that had clearly been locked from the inside.

I suppose it must have been around three o’clock when I decided that nobody could reasonably object if I stretched my legs in the garden, and I opened the front door to
be surprised (as one always is slightly surprised) by the bracing chill of a late-summer night. It brought back memories of other times when I had been awake at this hour at this time of year
– usually early-morning journeys to the airport with Geraldine, driving down to Gatwick to board charter flights leaving for Alicante or Goa or wherever she had decided we should go that
year. The clean freshness of the air and the silence recalled past nights, past relationships, past departures. At the moment, however, nobody was going anywhere. My car was still parked for the
quick getaway that Elsie had planned, should the evening prove dull. The once-clear path was however now blocked by a police car and a van, beside which there were, for some reason, two portable
floodlights, their dormant cables coiled round their bases. There was also a pile of what appeared to be plastic sheeting. I wondered if I should take notes for my next book. Probably not. These
things were easy enough to make up.

The official investigation was still proceeding somewhere inside Muntham Court, and I could be doing no possible harm admiring the stars from where I was, but a vague feeling that I should not
be there made me wander round to the side of the house. It would be good to sit on a bench for a few minutes, away from other people, to gather my thoughts. A bench was there, but somebody else had
had much the same idea. A hat-less policeman was already lounging on it, the red tip of an illicit smoke glowing in the dark. On hearing my approach he started to his feet, his cupped hand poised
to lob the offending butt into the bushes. He saw me and dropped back onto his seat, the cigarette still in place. He should probably have looked the guiltier of the two of us – nobody had
actually told me that I couldn’t leave the house, but he was almost certainly forbidden to smoke on duty. He simply smiled, however, and nodded.

‘Nice evening, Joe,’ I said.

‘Almost morning, Ethelred,’ he replied.

We had met before. A little late in my career as an author of police procedurals I had taken to consulting my local police station on points of detail. He had recently briefed me, over coffee,
about scene-of-crime investigations. The plume of smoke that he calmly exhaled suggested that he thought I owed him one – at the very least that I would not dare mention this to his
inspector.

‘Did you know Mr Muntham well?’ he asked me.

‘Sir Robert Muntham,’ I said. ‘I’d known him a long time. I’m not sure I knew him well.’

‘Very sad, anyway. I mean, sad that he decided to kill himself. It’s a bit like that Simon and Garfunkel song. You know the one . . .’

‘“Richard Cory”?’ I looked at the policeman. I hadn’t got him down as a Simon and Garfunkel fan. I adjusted his age upwards a few years. ‘Interestingly, the
song was based on an earlier poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.’

‘Who?’ he said.

Well,
I
had thought that it was interesting anyway.

‘It’s odd though,’ he continued. ‘Mr Muntham had everything, didn’t he? Money, a title, this place . . . And yet he chose to end it all.’

‘Are you saying it must have been suicide?’ I asked. ‘Is that what Lady Muntham has been told?’

‘Of course, the investigations aren’t complete. You obviously shouldn’t repeat what I’ve just said . . .’

‘No,’ I said.

He turned away and deftly flicked the remains of the cigarette onto the lawn, where it remained glowing for another minute or so. We watched it until the last small dot of red faded to
nothing.

‘I’d probably best be getting back,’ he said at length. ‘Good to see you again, Ethelred.’

‘Good to see you, Joe,’ I said.

The first hint of dawn was already in the sky when we were finally told we might leave. Felicity Hooper, the McIntoshes and the Smiths elected to stay on in various corners of
Muntham Court. Elsie consented to walk back, in the light of the amount of brandy we had both consumed. Clive Brent came to her rescue, however, and offered us both a lift back into the village. He
proved to be the owner of the green Jaguar. We sank back gratefully into the deep leather upholstery, and nobody mentioned carbon emissions.

Elsie insisted on a cup of hot chocolate before wandering off to occupy my bed. Just as the village was waking up and going about its business, I finally fell asleep on the sofa.

I seemed to have dozed only for a few minutes when I opened my eyes and saw Elsie sitting in front of me, drinking coffee.

‘I thought you were awake,’ she said cheerfully.

‘You’ve just woken me,’ I said.

‘I was right then.’ She took a big slurp of coffee.

‘Don’t you need to sleep?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The post has arrived. It looked interesting.’

‘I doubt that. It will just be bills and junk mail,’ I said, sitting up and taking the bundle from her. ‘You could have opened any of it, if you were curious – just so
long as it prevented your waking me up.’

‘I’m glad you said that,’ she said, producing an opened envelope. ‘You might like to read this one yourself then. It’s from your dead mate, Shagger. And he’s
asking for your help.’

Seven

‘You could say that,’ I said.

‘I just did say that,’ said Elsie.

I reread the note. It certainly appeared to run contrary to the police theory of suicide – or at least to the police theory as expounded by Joe the previous evening. Perhaps his views were
over-influenced by sixties folk-rock.

‘I can’t just waltz in and ransack the library,’ I said, returning to the matter in hand.

‘We won’t have to. Those instructions are pretty specific. It shouldn’t take us that long.’

‘Us?’ I said.

‘You’ll obviously need me there,’ said Elsie.

I declined to comment on that but did ask where the enclosed letter was. Elsie produced that from the bundle.

‘You didn’t open that too?’ I asked.

‘No, I only open
your
mail,’ she said, virtuously.

I took the letter and put it in my dressing-gown pocket.

‘But you
are
going to open it?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Shagger more or less says you can.’

‘He says he’d prefer me not to.’

‘But he says you can if your agent wants to see it.’

‘That is not my reading of Robert’s letter.’

‘Ethelred, could you stop behaving like a total pillock and
open the letter?’

‘No,’ I said.

Elsie was clearly beginning to regret her earlier good behaviour.

‘In future, I’m going to have all your post steamed open while you sleep,’ said the recently virtuous Elsie.

‘But, sadly, this time you didn’t,’ I said.

Elsie sipped her coffee, casting only the occasional glance towards my dressing-gown pocket, then said: ‘Anyway, it looks as though Shagger knew who his killer was going to be.’

‘Well, he was pretty certain he wasn’t going to be around to deliver the message in person.’

‘We need to find this second message,’ said Elsie thoughtfully.

‘And give it to the police,’ I said.

‘If he’d wanted to alert the police,’ said Elsie, ‘he’d have written to the police himself. Their contact details are in the phone book. Their cars have blue
flashing lights. They are deliberately easy to locate. This is something he wants only
us
to know about—’

‘—only
me
to know about,’ I corrected her.

Elsie shrugged. ‘Same thing,’ she said. ‘Writers and agents are, legally, a single entity.’

Elsie often used the word ‘legally’ to cover what would otherwise be quite large gaps in her arguments. This appeared to be a case in point. There was, however, a stronger reason for
her not to join me in ransacking the library.