The Herring Seller's Apprentice (3 page)

‘I haven’t finished,’ said Elsie, with a dismissive wave of her fat little hand. ‘I’m the detective for the moment. At best, you’re just a suspect.’

‘Sorry,’ said the suspect.

‘Theory number three: perhaps somebody’s murdered her and made it look like suicide.’

‘That’s possible,’ I said with a slight but carefully judged shrug.

‘No, it isn’t – it’s just wishful thinking,’ said Elsie, sighing deeply. ‘All these little twists and turns are Geraldine to a T. Take that missing car, alloy wheels too: the whole business of switching cars would seem totally unnecessary to anyone except Geraldine. So would that note: “I’ve gone to a better place.” You bet she has. She’s done a runner. I won’t believe she’s dead until I see the body – and possibly not even then.’

‘There may never be a body,’ I said, pulling the discussion back to the suicide theory. ‘The currents off that beach are pretty strong. She could have been swept right out into the Channel.’

‘Only if she could be arsed to go into the water,’ said Elsie, staring out of the window at the buildings opposite in the fading light. ‘And at the moment, there’s nothing to suggest that’s what she did. I’d lay a pretty large bet that she is still out there somewhere, warm and dry, spending somebody else’s money.’ She seemed to be casting her glance at Peckham’s the butchers, just opposite my flat; but there was no sign of Geraldine wildly buying chops and Peckham’s Celebration Sausages with her ill-gotten gains – only Tony could be seen inside the shop, moving briskly, meticulously sweeping and washing everything down before closing.

It was a peaceful scene: a Sussex village at dusk, with the summer moving gently towards autumn. Flint-walled houses with warm mossy roofs, one more pub than was strictly necessary, a post office and an Indian take-away, all cradled within the smooth and now darkening slopes of the South Downs. For most of the inhabitants, another uneventful day was about to be followed by another peaceful night. The Worthing-bound traffic on the bypass was no more than a distant murmur. A number of birds had, quite properly, decided that it was time for their evening chorus. Everything was just as it should be. This was, after all, a place where retired people came from London to grow old and die quietly in their beds, not a place for bizarre suicides in low-mileage red Fiats.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s leave this to the police, shall we? It is fortunately their job to find my wife, dead or alive. I agree that Geraldine would be perfectly capable of faking a suicide purely for the fun of the thing. But I shall leave my wife to the police.’

‘Your ex-wife,’ said Elsie.

‘My ex-wife,’ I said.

In the beginning writing was pure pleasure. It was Elsie who taught me that, with only a little effort, it could just as easily be mindless drudgery.

It was Elsie too who taught me that the royalties on a 300-page book are generally greater than those on a 200-page book, even if the story could be told better in 200 pages. (‘Add fifty per cent more suspects,’ she advised.) It was Elsie who insisted on a new Fairfax book every year, with a publication date to coincide with the purchase of Christmas presents. (She had a theory that people bought my books to give to others rather than to read themselves.) It was Elsie who helpfully suggested that plots could be endlessly recycled because my readers had the attention span of a gnat with Alzheimer’s. (For once I ignored her.)

My first Fairfax book,
All on a Summer’s Day,
was written when I was very young indeed – not yet twenty-five – and while I was still working for the Inland Revenue as the most junior of trainee tax inspectors. Writing was then – how can I express this? – a shiny box, brimming with an inexhaustible supply of chocolate of every possible type, whose textures and flavours I could still only guess at. I relished every word, trying for some perfection that I knew must be possible and, I think, almost achieved in that first novel. The plot must have come to me in a single flash, because I don’t remember having to alter it significantly as the book progressed.

Fairfax, drinking heavily and barely tolerated by his colleagues, is on the verge of early retirement. A murder inquiry is being closed without an arrest or any real progress. Fairfax, as the least useful member of the team, has been left to tidy up the paperwork while others move on to more promising cases. There is no pressure to finish the task quickly – indeed, Fairfax’s colleagues are praying that it will keep him out of their way until his farewell party. In a strange way, it suits Fairfax too – never a team player at the best of times and increasingly comfortable with his solitary drinking bouts and lonely task. In his more sober moments, however, Fairfax works his way methodically, the stub of a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, through the evidence that has been collected.

My story opens on 6 July – the anniversary of the date of the crime, and a stiflingly hot day. Fairfax’s brain has not been called upon to work at full stretch for some time, but there is something about the case that has troubled him almost since the start: a feeling that they have overlooked the obvious. While glancing at his till receipt during a refreshing liquid lunch at the White Hart, it suddenly strikes Fairfax that 6/7 on a receipt might mean 6 July or 7 June, depending on whether you write the day or month first. This is perhaps more obvious now than it was then, when only Americans wrote dates backwards. He leaves his third pint almost untouched and returns to his desk. Sure enough, one key assumption ultimately rests on a single small piece of evidence – a receipt – that gives the date not as 6 July but as 6/7
.
With trembling nicotine-stained fingers, Fairfax goes back through the statements again, this time discounting this piece of evidence. It is like a crossword puzzle in which an early answer has been incorrectly entered, making a nonsense of later clues.

Now that this small false step has been corrected, other seemingly unimportant fragments slip into place. Sitting at his desk, Fairfax reruns the whole inquiry, using the evidence that they had all along, but from this new starting point. By the end of the afternoon he has solved in a day what the team failed to achieve in a year. I concluded the story not with the arrest of the suspect nor even with the chief constable congratulating Fairfax, but with Fairfax happily surrounded by disorganized heaps of paper, waiting for the inspector to come in and ask him whether everything has been filed yet.

The book ran to less than 150 pages and, because the action takes place in a single day, has a particularly satisfying structure. Apart from the brief visit to the pub and back, the action does not shift from the room in the police station. I enjoyed playing with recurring metaphors such as an unfinished crossword puzzle on Fairfax’s desk, and dropping early clues about the ambiguous nature of dates through the medium of Fairfax’s own historical studies. It was the only Fairfax book that I can say I really enjoyed writing and it is perhaps ironic that it is the only one that is now out of print, being (in the view of my publisher) incompatible with the later fast-moving plots and scrupulous attention to the detail of modern police investigations. By the time I wrote the second Fairfax book I had Elsie as my agent and was taking a harder and more commercial approach to literature. Today I look at that box of chocolates and it seems to be empty except for a couple of unwanted coffee creams that are all that now remains of the very bottom layer.

I think that Fairfax both sensed and resented the change in my attitude and he became, if anything, more introverted and secretive. He stepped back, it has to be admitted, from open alcoholic excess, but I could tell that he was still drinking quite heavily on the quiet. Most writers will tell you of the strange phenomenon by which the characters they create take on a life of their own. Fairfax, like Elsie, often seemed to disregard my opinions completely.

It was in the second book,
A Most Civilized Murder,
that I decided to give Fairfax an interest in church architecture. I knew before I did so that he would have strong views, but I had no idea how quirky they would prove to be. I quickly found that he had no time for Perpendicular, the very glory and summit of English high Gothic, referring to it disparagingly as ‘spiky’. He also despised Decorated and Early English. The only true church architecture for Fairfax was solid, gloomy, cavernous Norman. Even Transitional, with its tentative move away from the semicircle and towards the pointed arch, he viewed as effete, decadent and suspect. As for Wren, that dickhead had completely lost the plot: St Paul’s was a mere pagan temple, unworthy of the name of a Christian church.

Having discovered Fairfax’s preferences, I immediately gave Buckford a pristine and unaltered Norman cathedral, which he thereafter visited frequently, though with no especial show of gratitude. When, at a much later stage, I started to have to draw maps of Buckford, I realized that in
All on a Summer’s Day
Fairfax must have walked past the cathedral twice without a glance or a single comment. But, as I have said, the book is now out of print, and nobody is ever likely to spot that strange anomaly.

How Fairfax manages to reconcile his idiosyncratic but nevertheless very genuine Christian piety with his secret drinking bouts and unfathomable pessimism is something that he keeps locked deep inside his policeman’s soul, and has never revealed to me.

I had scarcely shown Elsie out of the flat, when the bell rang yet again.

I must explain that Findon, where I now live, though large for a Sussex village, is en route to nowhere except Worthing. Friends from London did not habitually drop in on their way to and from other places. Elsie occasionally forsook her office, as she had that afternoon, to visit me rather than vice versa, but more usually I made the journey up to Hampstead to see her. Friends from Findon, such as I had, rarely called unannounced. Days, often weeks, passed without anyone ringing the bell of my small flat in Greypoint House. My immediate reaction was therefore that Elsie had left something behind or that the police had returned with additional questions. Nothing had quite prepared me for who it would be.

‘Rupert?’ I asked, because I was for a moment genuinely uncertain.

Middle age is cruel to the truly beautiful. I am neither more nor less remarkable now than I was when I was twenty. But for the
jeunesse dorée,
middle age can prove a dramatic fall from grace.

I had known Rupert well during his own golden-youth epoch. We had read the same subject at the same college. We were not inseparable – indeed I now realize that, in a strange way, we were scarcely even friends. But he chose, for reasons of his own, to spend a great deal of time in my company.

He was tall, blond, aristocratic and improbably good-looking. I was tall. There was no situation, no society, no geographical location in which Rupert looked anything other than at home and at ease. I rarely felt at home anywhere – least of all when I actually was at home. Perhaps he felt my ordinariness acted as a counterpoint to his own charm and beauty. If so, it would never have occurred to him not to use this fact to his advantage, nor would it have occurred to him that he needed to offer anything in return. I remember one occasion, when we were together in a restaurant, I had thanked the waiter for some small service – possibly fetching me a clean knife or filling my glass with water. ‘You don’t need to thank him all the time in that disgustingly servile manner,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s his job, Ethelred. It’s what he’s
for.’
Amusing Rupert, providing him with alcohol, making him look or feel better – these were simply the things that I was for.

The first time I met Rupert could, I suppose, have been at the principal’s sherry party for freshers at the beginning of Michaelmas term; but large gatherings at which he was not the centre of attention were not conditions under which Rupert considered that he could be appreciated at his best. I do not remember his being at the party and quite possibly, contrary to all custom and precedent, he chose not to go. What I do recall very clearly is a day or two later, when he arrived unbidden at my rooms at college and, with only the briefest of introductions, draped himself instinctively in the only chair without broken springs and announced, ‘Somebody usually gives me a drink round about now. I don’t mind what it is, as long as it’s the best. If you don’t know what’s the best, just give me the most expensive.’ I had been trying to write an essay, did not want company and had little enough money to buy my own alcohol, let alone other people’s. That evening Rupert got through half a bottle of malt whisky before leaving unsteadily, but just as abruptly as he had arrived. I later found that he had been sick on the staircase as he departed, something for which my scout blamed (and never quite forgave) my immediate neighbour.

‘Somebody usually gives me a drink round about now.’ It was a very Rupert phrase. So was, ‘It’s been such a pleasure to see me.’ Some people – the majority of people, I think – found Rupert intensely irritating, but others could not resist succumbing to his peculiar charm. I couldn’t. Later, in a much more comprehensive manner, nor could my wife.

There was a theory, amongst the girls in our year, that Rupert was homosexual. When I pointed out that he had innumerable girlfriends, they merely gave each other knowing glances and said, ‘Exactly.’ I had no girlfriends, but nobody felt the need to attribute this to my sexuality.

Geraldine first entered my life as one of Rupert’s transitory companions. She was two or three years younger than we were and was, at the time, at one of the secretarial colleges that flourished as a sort of distant penumbra of the university. In some ways she was Rupert’s perfect counterpart – a lively blonde with almost perfect legs, a seductive smile and eyes that sparkled with a constant mischief. She anticipated by some years the fashion for dressing in black that, much later, everyone seemed to adopt. I am not suggesting that she was in any way fashion-conscious, still less a leader of fashion. Indeed, she usually dressed very simply in a sweater or polo-neck and a skirt just short enough to display her black-stockinged legs to the best possible advantage. But black suited her and she knew that it suited her.