The Herring Seller's Apprentice (17 page)

‘Which is?’ asked Elsie.

‘A bit of this. A bit of that,’ he replied. ‘More coffee, dear lady?’

It was shortly after that meeting that Elsie made a strange remark to me, though perhaps with hindsight it did make some sense.

‘Elizabeth never did have an eye for the genuine article, did she?’

‘Dennis, you mean? No, he clearly isn’t what you might call out of the top drawer.’

‘Dennis and Rupert.’

‘Rupert?’

‘My old man knew Rupert’s old man quite well.’

‘In Southend?’

‘They were both in the same business – fruit and veg.’

‘What, you mean that Rupert’s father ran a fruit-and-vegetable stall?’

‘Maybe not that. He was apparently quite well off as these things go. But he used to do business with my old man, so he wasn’t exactly the Duke of Westminster. He used to give my old man credit, so he wasn’t exactly Albert Einstein either.’

I did not try to argue with her, though I later wondered how Elsie’s father, who had probably never met Rupert, could be so certain that it was Rupert’s father that he had met and done business with. That his father might have made his money from fruit and vegetables added yet another side to Rupert’s character, but it did nothing to solve the more immediate problems that confronted me.

But the meeting with Dennis had cleared up one doubt in my mind. It had, if you like, closed one of the many doors that had been annoyingly open when the policeman first brought me the news of Geraldine’s disappearance. My problem now was that I had been too successful in ruling out lines of inquiry and had left myself nowhere to go. There was one vital piece of information I still required, but it seemed that I would have to wait for that to come to me – if it ever chose to do so.

The police investigation too seemed to be losing the brisk momentum with which it had began. Nobody now searched Cissbury Ring for clues, and the remnants of blue-striped tape had vanished from the gorse bushes. Contact with the police became, for me, a rarer event. My brief notoriety in the village too had come and gone. The few people who knew I had any connection with the case (and nobody in Findon had ever met Geraldine in real life) had ceased even to comment on the bizarre coincidence of her death. I had been told that I would need to attend a coroner’s court, then that I would not be needed after all. I was told that the police would soon have further information, then heard nothing from them for weeks. I was still a step or two ahead of the police, but it was doing me no good.

I did not expect the case’s appearance on television to take things forward, nor do I think it eventually did. But that evening I naturally felt obliged to be in front of my television set in Findon, as I knew Elsie would be in Hampstead. Geraldine’s last known movements and the finding of the body were reported in detail, with just a few significant facts withheld, as I believe is customary in these cases. (Fairfax would have no truck with the media, so appeals to the public via the television are an aspect of police work that I have never researched.) The presenter made it clear that the police saw this as just one of a series of murders committed in West Sussex, and ended by appealing for information concerning the whereabouts of Mr George Peters, who the police thought might be able to help them with their inquiries. Mr Peters was urged to contact them if only to rule himself out of the investigation. (‘Oh, right,’ I thought. ‘I’m sure he’ll be only too happy.’)

Of course, it was not the only case featured that evening and again I was struck by the patterns, the coincidences. There were strange parallels, for example, in another case – one Mary Jones of Margate, whose face now appeared on the screen, smiling shyly. Miss Jones too had had a failing business, though in her case it had been a design consultancy. On the day of her disappearance, she had visited Bournemouth to make a presentation to a company that she hoped would offer her some work. She was deeply in debt and this was, acquaintances had darkly told the police, a meeting that she saw as her last chance to save her business from failure. She had arrived in Bournemouth by train and allowed ample time for a meeting that she expected might take two hours; it had in fact been curtailed after fifteen minutes. She was informed that her approach was not one that would suit the client concerned: they had no wish to waste any more of her (or their) time. She thanked them politely and left, saying that she would perhaps visit a local art gallery before catching the return train. She was never seen again, other than the obligatory blurred image on a security camera in a department store. A little later £400 was withdrawn from her bank account in two separate transactions using her cash card.

She had no close family and, it seemed, few friends. It had been over two weeks before anyone even thought to report her missing. We had been treated to a few charming shots of Bournemouth, but now Mary’s picture was flashed up on the screen again. Had anyone seen her on the day of her disappearance in September or in the weeks that followed? She smiled at us out of the television, in a picture taken at a party perhaps or on a rare day out. ‘I’m probably dead, but please don’t trouble yourself on my account,’ it seemed to say. You felt that this lightly freckled face could have been quite pretty, given even minimal effort, but the long mousy hair did not flatter her, nor did her lack of make-up. Her dress, as far as one could tell, looked drab and old-fashioned. You could almost see her at the presentation: shy, diffident, lacking in confidence, bound not to succeed. In one small vignette you saw an entire life of humiliating failure. ‘Where did she go after the meeting?’ asked the presenter. Had we seen her? Could we help? But you could have passed her a dozen times in the street without noticing her. So, no, probably not.

There were three others who had also vanished without trace. Wayne, a wannabe actor, had left home for London and never reported in. Single mother Paula was believed to be sleeping rough in the Manchester area without single baby Tiffany, who awaited her return. Ada, nice old dear and sufferer from Alzheimer’s, had not been seen by neighbours for two weeks and was believed to have wandered off to her ultimate doom and destruction. Had we seen them? Could we help?

All four pictures appeared again, each occupying one-quarter of the screen – four total strangers juxtaposed for an instant in time. A number to ring was flashed up, partly obscuring Wayne and Ada, who had drawn the short straw and chanced to comprise the bottom half of the picture.

Then it was on to a shocking case of the impersonation of a gas-meter reader in Sevenoaks; and Wayne, Ada, Paula and Mary were returned to the back burner.

The phone rang and I knew that it would be Elsie.

‘Well?’ she said, getting, as ever, straight to the point.

‘It won’t help,’ I said.

‘She wasn’t murdered by a serial killer,’ she said. ‘I’m certain of that. You know it, too. Remind me again why you told Dennis the Menace that you believed the police version?’

‘Because it really doesn’t matter who it was,’ I said.

‘How can you say that?’

‘It’s true. It doesn’t affect anything.’

‘I’ve been thinking, Ethelred, shouldn’t we tell the police about the Swiss bank account at least? I know that it would be embarrassing for Smith – but that can scarcely worry you. I suppose that it might also mean the creditors get their hands on the money and Rupert will lose out too. But neither of them are exactly deserving cases. Quite the reverse – next to Geraldine, the two of them must have done you more harm than anybody. Surely you can’t feel any need to protect them?’

‘The harm that has been done cannot be undone,’ I said. ‘None of it.’

‘You’re in a cheerful mood tonight.’

‘Programmes about crime do that to me.’

‘Don’t have nightmares,’ said Elsie.

‘I won’t.’

But all that night, whenever I closed my eyes I saw the sad, haunting face of Mary Jones – the long mousy hair, the freckles, the apologetic smile. What had been in her mind the day she disappeared? Was she, like Geraldine, planning to vanish quietly and start afresh elsewhere?

In the grey half-light of a winter dawn I went to the cramped little room that serves as the kitchen to my flat and made myself a cup of coffee. Then I sat there alone, sipping it very slowly.

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I can no longer remember precisely why I chose the latter part of the fourteenth century for my historical novels. It was as good a time as any, and nobody had done it recently – not as detective fiction, anyway. Today of course a new writer of historical whodunits would find that there were few empty slots in the calendar, but I was in there early enough to stake my claim to Richard II and to mine that slender seam of gold for what it was worth. It has been worth four books so far. Like so many other things in my life, it could have been worse.

All ages, if you examine them closely enough, prove to be periods of transition. Nothing stands still and each century is (depending on your viewpoint) a dusty trackway from the last or the green lane leading to the next. Or whatever. But the late fourteenth century …

Though few at the time had yet noticed, large cracks were starting to appear all over the proud but grubby facade of feudalism. Soon the tidal wave of the Peasants’ Revolt would surge up from the coasts of Essex and Kent, until it spilled over the walls of London and gurgled into the stinking River Fleet. And though it would all trickle away again with the ebb tide, it would leave a strange and unfamiliar landscape in its wake, smelling of fresh salt air and dead fish: a rich soil in which all manner of unexpected things might grow, given time.

Of greater interest to me as a writer was that, in that same fertile landscape, French was giving way to English as the language of literature. A certain Geoffrey Chaucer was busy at his day job in the king’s service, while turning out the occasional poem.

I originally had the idea of making Chaucer the central character in the novels – the first was to be called
Inspector Chaucer Investigates –
but, once the novelty of Chaucer as a policeman had worn off, there seemed little more to the joke than that. I eventually came up with a minor official in Chaucer’s office: Master Thomas, a failed physician employed as a clerk, who was able to use both his position at court and his medical knowledge to solve the crimes that occurred with surprising regularity (two and a half per book on average) in and about an otherwise dull customs office. I came to the books with no preconceptions about Chaucer’s character, other than to be vaguely well disposed towards a fellow writer. Viewed from Master Thomas’s eyes he rapidly became a loathsome windbag, driving his staff to exhaustion, belittling all literary efforts except his own and flaunting his tenuous links with the aristocracy. He was also a plagiarist. Many of his finest lines proved to have been stolen from Master Thomas, who was also unwise enough to share with Chaucer his plans to write a book about some pilgrims going to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. (‘Canterbury,’ said Chaucer with a condescending smile. ‘In spite of some passing resemblance to the modest little manuscript that you showed me, my own work concerns
Canterbury.
Another place entirely, my dear Master Thomas. Now, what were you saying a moment ago about April showers?’) One feature that Thomas shared with Fairfax was that he received almost no credit for his efforts, literary or detective, and looked fated to remain for ever a clerk in the Customs House. For a while I feared that Master Thomas would merely become a fourteenth-century Fairfax, but he remained obstinately chirpy and shared none of Fairfax’s introspectiveness. Nor, surprisingly, did he share Fairfax’s interest in church architecture. In the fourteenth century Perpendicular was replacing Decorated as the dominant style, but Thomas declined to make any observations on the subject other than to note, on a visit to Canterbury Cathedral, that the remodelling of the nave was producing an unreasonable amount of dust.