The Herring Seller's Apprentice (10 page)

I parked the car in my appointed space and was irritated to see, as I walked back, one of the girls from the village sitting on the wall in front of Greypoint House, kicking at the flints with her heels. I gave her a frown. ‘I don’t think that’s your wall to kick,’ I observed.

She looked up and squinted at me. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘It happens to be my wall,’ I said. ‘At least, one-eighth of it is.’

‘One-eighth? Of
this
?’

‘Roughly.’

‘Get a life,’ she observed, and gave the wall a good hard bang with her heel before jumping down.

I scowled again and said, ‘And don’t let me catch you there again’ – or something equally middle-aged and ineffectual.

But what I was thinking was this. ‘A life? Yes, that’s not a bad idea. One of these days I really must get one of those.’

If there’s one thing that gets up my sodding nose, it’s starting a new chapter and finding that the poxy narrator has changed. Changing the typeface just adds insult to injury, as if the author (silly tosser) reckons the reader won’t recognize it’s somebody else without double underlining everything and putting it in twenty-four-point sodding Haettenschweiler. Or whatever.

It was the sort of trick that I had to warn Ethelred against in the way that mothers used to warn their sons against scarlet women. Mind you, I should have warned Ethelred about women as well, before the Bitch got her claws into him. I was onto her game from day one. Oh yes. But you can’t make people see. Not when they imagine they’re in love. I’d pass a law against it myself.

When the Bitch cleared off, it almost destroyed him. For months he wrote nothing, which is fine if you’ve got royalties from a dozen books coming in, but he hadn’t.And I don’t need to tell you what my 12½ per cent of sod all was. He even let the Bitch have the flat and anything else she wanted.

Nobody seemed to be on his side in those days. His best friend had stuffed him. His sister-in-law, Charlotte, had never really liked him – she regarded Ethelred as a dead loss from the start: a lanky, mournful loser unworthy even of her sister. When they split up she could, initially, scarcely contain her glee. (It was only later, when she got to know Rupert better, that she realized that Geraldine could have done worse than Ethelred.) His bank manager – a guy named Smith, whom he’d known for years – even turned him down for a mortgage on the basis that his writer’s income alone was insufficient security. That more than anything else forced Ethelred out of London, away from his friends and down into the depths of Sussex, where living was cheaper and bank managers more understanding. Since most of his former friends seemed to be lining up to kick him, moving out of their reach was not, perhaps, the unmitigated disaster it might have been. Not, as far as I could tell, that he made any new friends down by the sea. He didn’t seem willing to trust anyone. Nobody. Ever.

So, when Ethelred moved to Findon I thought, right, he’s broke, he’s screwed up, he’s got no mates, but at least the Bitch is out of his hair.

For a while the books flowed nicely again. A regular Fairfax every year, building up a nice loyal readership. When he wanted to try something different – historical stuff – I suggested he did so under another name, and that worked too. So did the romantic fiction – though it was obviously, like all romantic fiction, a load of old bollocks.

When did it start going wrong? Before the Bitch’s death, certainly. I noticed a sort of restlessness, a reluctance to get down to the next Fairfax, which even then was overdue. He kept saying why didn’t he try this and why didn’t he try that? Because you’re not up to it, you silly tart, I would reply. Well, you have to be cruel to be kind sometimes, don’t you?

Then he went off to France and I thought, OK, so maybe the change will do him some good. But it was worse after that. Her death affected him oddly – and I mean oddly.

Take the evening we heard she’d gone missing. (I generously hung around and sat with him in case the pigs gave him a hard time.) He didn’t turn a hair when the copper said that she’d committed suicide. He did say, ‘Bloody hell,’or something when he heard she’d done it at West Wittering. But what really seemed to upset him was the fact that she’d been driving a red Fiat. I mean, how does any of that add up?

Then there were times when you could have sworn that he didn’t give a damn whether the murderer was caught or not.Again, don’t get me wrong here: my own attitude was a little ambivalent, shall we say? Whoever had murdered Geraldine had obviously done so with the best of intentions, and there was no point in trying to blame anyone. But I was curious to know who had done it. Well, you are, aren’t you?

So there was Ethelred dashing from place to place asking everyone questions. (And don’t tell me that was just to fulfil his duties as an executor. I mean, do me a favour.) But he didn’t seem interested in actually finding anything out. And he seemed neither properly miserable nor jubilant at the Bitch’s untimely demise.

He’d only ever really loved two women, he once told me. One was this teacher he’d had at primary school, the other was the Bitch.And both, strangely, had been called Geraldine. So, I could have understood if he’d been a bit upset, even after all this time, at something happening to one or other of them. But he wasn’t.

On the other hand, he
was
worried about something. I noticed it first … when? Just after he had identified the body. Distressing no doubt, but, in a way, it should have been cathartic. I mean it might have triggered the self-pitying remorse or it might have cheered him up a bit. But that was exactly when he started to become moody, bad-tempered almost. And worried. Yes, definitely worried.

And the whole time I felt that there was stuff he knew, but he didn’t want to tell me. Does that make sense to you? I mean, does it make sense his not telling
me
?

So what was Ethelred’s great quest all about? I knew of course that after his visit to the flat he’d been to Geraldine’s old office, then to the bank, then to see Rupert. I wasn’t supposed to know that? Oh, give me some credit for a
bit
of deviousness. No, I didn’t follow him … well, all right, I did follow him for a bit, but once he set off up the Holloway Road, I knew that a quick phone call later would confirm whether or not he’d been to see Rupert. Not bad for an apprentice, eh?

So I sat by the phone that evening waiting for him to call and tell me what he’d found out, but did he? Nothing for it in that case but to drive down to Findon, on a plausible pretext that I would come up with in due course, and pay him a visit. Little did I imagine that the visit would be quite as profitable as it was.

It rained for most of the next week, and then it carried on raining. I later read that it had been the wettest autumn since records began. All that morning I had sat in front of my computer trying to conjure up a new Fairfax story, but the rain dripped and dripped from the broken gutter above the window and Fairfax remained sulky and uncommunicative. Several times I got off to what seemed to be a good start, but on each occasion I found the storyline taking an odd, almost surreal direction. Fairfax had in the past often expressed a contempt for all types of detective fiction, ignoring the fact that he was himself a product of the genre. Now it was as if he had suddenly woken up to the strange anomaly of his position and was mocking me. Twice I completed over a thousand words before deleting the whole thing and starting again.

My third attempt was interrupted by another visit from the police. I had had little contact with them for a week or so, but now they seemed anxious to brief me on their progress.

‘We think, Mr Tressider, that we have been able to link your wife’s murder to a number of others in the area.’

‘I see.’

‘There have been four killings over the past two years that we believe are connected. All of the victims were female and blonde, all were strangled, and their bodies were all found within twenty miles or so of where we discovered your wife. There was also a further incident – another blonde lady. She got talking to a man in a pub and he then offered to drive her home. Said he had a Porsche, which indeed he did. As they drove along, however, she became aware that the route he was taking was not the most direct one. They stopped and he suggested a moonlight stroll, but she was understandably cautious at this stage and on her guard. When he confirmed her suspicions by trying to strangle her, she kneed him in the groin and, to cut a long story short, we now have a very good description of him. I am pleased to say that as a result we think we have made a positive identification.’

‘And you have made an arrest?’ I was suddenly quite literally on the edge of my seat.

‘Not yet. He has disappeared. Gone. Scarpered.’

No reply seemed to be expected of me, so I said nothing.

‘We’re going to run the case on
Crimewatch,’
he added with more than a hint of pride. ‘No harm in telling you who he is, since we’ll be asking for information on him then. Does the name George Peters mean anything to you?’

‘No,’ I said, finally able to trust myself to speak. Even going back to my earliest childhood I honestly couldn’t think of anyone I had met named George Peters.

‘Well, that’s our man,’ he said, ‘and once we pull him in, I don’t think we’ll have to look much further for your wife’s killer.’

‘Well done,’ I said.

‘You don’t sound convinced,’ he said.

‘No, I really am frightfully impressed, officer.’

He squinted at me. ‘If there is anything that you know about the murder that you haven’t told us, sir, I would advise you to do so. Withholding evidence could be an offence.’

I leaned back in my chair and stretched out my legs. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’ I said.

After the police had left, I felt that I had to get out, even if I got soaked to the skin in the process, but the skies brightened towards the end of the morning, and the rain became no more than an intermittent drizzle. Accordingly I donned a Barbour and wellingtons and set off along Nepcote Lane and up towards Cissbury Ring.

The steady rain had started to strip the trees of their leaves and abandon them in soggy black drifts on each side of the road. There they formed miniature dams, holding back lateral puddles of murky water. The last sad blackberries of a poor season hung grey and rotting on the bare branches. The sheep looked damp and miserable. And water dripped and dripped. It did little else. From every branch, every leaf, every twig, it dripped.

I skirted the Ring and pressed on across the downs in the direction of Steyning. The chalky mud was often the consistency of wet cement, but out here in the clean upland air, problems that had seemed immense dwindled into the blue distance. I had frequently found that a long walk enabled me to get ideas clear in my mind and to resolve inconsistencies that had suddenly revealed themselves in the plot.

Today was no exception and, in the damp autumn Sussex countryside, I forgot such troubles as I had seemed to have and started to see a picture of a sultry summer’s evening in Buckford.

Fairfax is sitting at his desk. He is once more contemplating retirement. And he is deeply troubled, though it is not yet clear about what. He is talking to one of the younger policemen – apparently about everyday matters, but increasingly hinting to the reader some inner conflict that will undoubtedly be revealed in later chapters. We cut to another part of Buckford. A man is contemplating a crime, though we do not yet know what the crime is. This is not however some ordinary villain – this is somebody well known to Fairfax, a friend, to the extent that Fairfax has friends. At some point his story and Fairfax’s are destined to converge, but not for several chapters. Events, whatever they prove to be, will test Fairfax’s loyalties to the utmost. Or then again perhaps not. Perhaps he will have no difficulty in bringing this friend to justice. Perhaps he will abandon his loyalties to a service that has signally failed to reward him for his efforts. Perhaps it will be his very last case.

What happens next? I don’t yet know. But the story has started flowing. And this small trickle may gather pace and become a stream, then a torrent that will carry the story off, who knows where? But that hot summer night would be the starting point.

The sun broke through the clouds as I passed Cissbury Ring on my return. In the warmer air steam was rising distinctly from the backs of the sheep. Here and there dry patches were appearing on the road. On Nepcote Green, Catrin from Findon Farmhouse was out walking Thistle, her Border terrier. I gave her a wave as usual and she waved back. Somewhere a bird, in its ignorance, may possibly have sung. Is it only with hindsight that I feel that everything on that walk back was suspiciously normal? That I was being lulled into a false sense of security?

Greypoint House too looked its usual self, though the gutter was still dripping gently onto the gravel below. I climbed the stairs to my flat, eager to sit down again in front of the keyboard. Fat chance of that.

The first sign I had that anything was amiss was the fact that the mortice on my front door was unlocked, whereas I was certain that I had locked it when I left. Cautiously I turned the key in the Yale, and opened the door. I paused, carefully reached for a walking stick from the stand by the door and listened, then (hoping for an element of surprise) I sprang into the sitting room.

Elsie looked up from where she was sitting. ‘What are you playing at, Ethelred, you tart?’

In front of her, spread out on my coffee table, were all of Geraldine’s accounts. On the floor for some reason was a book of road maps of the British Isles. Clutched in her hand was a bar of chocolate. Seeing my frown of displeasure she looked first at the chocolate, then at the accounts and then back to the chocolate.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she said. ‘It was in the
cupboard.’

I parked my car just round the corner from Greypoint House and walked over and rang the bell. No sodding reply, of course. You’d have thought that even Ethelred would have had the sense not to go out on a day when it was pissing down, but there you are.