by L. C. Tyler
Sorry to be a bit cryptic. I need to cover all eventualities, and this currently seems the best way to do it.
Your old chum
Shagger
‘I suppose,’ said Elsie, who had been rereading the letter over my shoulder, ‘you could say that this untoward thing had happened – from Shagger’s point of view it’s all gone as untoward as it possibly could. Hence, we need to retrieve this message from the library. It would seem Shagger knew somebody was about to bump him off in an ingenious manner and wanted us to know who it was going to be. That’s kind of him, of course, but it all looks a bit tortuous.’
‘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.
‘Don’t you have to get back to London?’ I asked. ‘You said you didn’t have time to stay for the Findon Sheep Fair.’
‘Most things, Ethelred, take priority over a sheep fair, whatever that is. My return to London will have to be delayed while we ponder this question: How do we get into Shagger’s library without exciting attention – particularly the attention of whoever bumped him off?’
The phone rang.
‘Ethelred,’ said Annabelle, as soon as I had picked up the receiver, ‘you have to come over at once. I need you here.’
‘I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes,’ I said.
I put the phone down. Elsie was looking at me pointedly.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Let’s hope she gives you a nice dog biscuit when you get there,’ she said.
Although I pointed out to Elsie that, my car still being at Muntham Court, we would have to walk there through the rural mud and mire, she made light of difficulties.
‘Yeah, I can manage in these shoes. The road wasn’t that bad after all.’
‘I think there may have been rain overnight.’
‘It should have washed some of the mud away then,’ said Elsie.
Annabelle was only slightly perturbed to see Elsie.
‘Ah, Elise . . . so very sweet of you to come too. While I’m talking to Ethelred perhaps you would like to—’
‘—talk to me too?’ suggested Elsie.
‘Why not?’ Annabelle said, weakly. Things were obviously very bad indeed.
She took us into the conservatory, and sat us down in wicker chairs amongst the spreading palms. The sun was already warm on the large glass panes and the air felt steamy. Perhaps Annabelle thought it was somewhere we would not be disturbed. People were probably breakfasting or indeed (if they had nobody to awaken them) sleeping in one of the house’s many bedrooms. I envied them.
‘I’ve just had a call from the police,’ she said, with a grimace.
I nodded.
‘They think it was suicide,’ she whispered.
‘Isn’t it a little early . . .’ I began, though after last night’s conversation, I was not entirely surprised.
‘They are saying that it would have been impossible for anyone to have killed Robert and then got out of the room, bolting the door and locking the windows after them. Of course, there’ll have to be an inquest, but they’ve clearly already made up their minds. All the inquest will hear is that anything other than suicide would have been physically impossible.’
‘Perhaps it was suicide,’ I said. ‘After all, who could possibly have wanted to see Robert dead? Certainly none of the guests.’
‘Perhaps not one of the guests,’ she conceded, ‘but an intruder on the other hand . . . Robert was very careless about security. I was always talking to him about it. But do men listen?’
‘No,’ said Elsie.
‘Have the police looked for signs of an intruder?’ I asked.
‘They say they have. They tramped round the garden at first light, making a mess everywhere, I’ve no doubt. They’ve had people in funny boiler suits taking fingerprints and swabs and things in the library. But they’d made up their minds from the start.’
‘The police are occasionally right,’ I said.
‘But it can’t be suicide,’ said Annabelle. ‘He wasn’t depressed. He wasn’t even unhappy, was he? We’d only just got married – well, eighteen months ago. We’d bought this lovely new house. He had me . . . He wouldn’t have killed himself – I know he wouldn’t. Ethelred, you saw a lot of him – he talked to you – he wasn’t unhappy, was he?’
‘No,’ I said. Actually, he’d often seemed pretty miserable, but no more so than dozens of other people who were still out there, alive and getting on with their day. Still, what was I to tell Robert’s widow? Should I say that he seemed to spend as much time as possible finding plausible ways to delay his return to Muntham Court – even if that meant visiting me?
‘I’m not sure how I can help,’ I said.
‘You’re a crime writer,’ she said. ‘You know all about clues and things. Amateur detectives always manage to spot things the police miss.’
‘Not in real life,’ I said.
‘So, it’s all rubbish in your books then?’
‘Pretty much,’ volunteered Elsie. ‘Still, I think we could help you check for clues. Let’s start with the library.’
Annabelle looked at her curiously. She seemed naturally suspicious of Elsie’s plan and in any case, as it transpired, had a plan of her own. ‘Thank you, Elise,’ she said after a long pause. ‘It would be very useful indeed if Ethelred checked the library. There may be . . . something . . . that we haven’t spotted. I think, however, w
e might get you to start with the garden.’
Thus it was that I found myself in the library alone.
I have to admit that being alone anywhere in that cavernous, gothic house was slightly spooky. As I entered the library I was sure that I felt the temperature drop a couple of degrees. When I had last been in this room, after all, my friend Robert had been stretched out over that desk with a thin rope wound round his throat.
I searched for any feasible exit, other than the door through which I had just entered or the window by which I had got in last night. I went over and peered up the chimney, but it was of the narrow domestic variety – practical Victorian rather than capacious and romantic Jacobean – and not designed for rapid exits from murder scenes. The chairs were large and comfortable, but not big enough to conceal an assassin of any size. The globe, which I had noticed from outside the room, was a remarkable piece of Victorian artisanship. I checked the outlines of long-dissolved countries – Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, French West Africa. It had probably come with the house. It didn’t seem the sort of thing you would own unless you already possessed a vast library to go with it. I tapped the oak panelling that gave the room its rather gloomy and melancholy character. Most of it sounded hollow, as I guess most panelling does, but my researches revealed nothing of interest. I gave up tapping halfway round and looked again at the window catches to see if there was any way they could be made to fall into place after somebody had made their exit – a piece of thread, say, tied to the catch. The catches were, however, all quite stiff and there was no sign of thread still attached to any of them. There genuinely seemed to be no way in or out of the library other than the obvious ones.
Duty, as it were, done I sat down at Robert’s desk in Robert’s chair and started opening drawers.
He had said the middle right. It proved, reassuringly, to be full of envelopes and other stationery – all heavy and cream-coloured. I riffled through them all, expecting to find a note tucked between two envelopes, but there was nothing. Robert hadn’t wanted anyone to find this by chance. I started again, looking carefully inside each envelope. About halfway through, I found a sheet of plain white A5, folded once and placed in one of the thick, creamy envelopes. As Robert had said, it was not addressed to me, but this was clearly it.
The contents were not remotely what I expected.
What you must seek is not so very far
From Andes hills or Afric slopes, a jar
Will grant the seekers everything they crave
You shall receive where formerly you gave
This was clearly Robert trying to be clever, and succeeding in being incomprehensible. True, anyone stumbling on this by accident would assume he had just copied out a few lines of rather bad poetry from somewhere, if they bothered to assume anything at all about it. And knowing I was looking for clues as to the whereabouts of something, it meant more to me – but unfortunately not as much more as I would have liked. I searched the room again, this time looking for a hiding place for the third clue rather than an exit. I spent some time prodding the globe – especially around South America and the African Rift Valley – but without revealing any secret compartments. I checked the atlas on the bookshelves, being careful to ensure that no slip of paper had been hidden between the African or South American pages. I scoured the room for a tobacco jar, or any other sort of jar, in which further clues might have been placed. The key message was clear – it was not sending me to Africa or South America but was saying that there was a further clue ‘not so very far’ away – somewhere in the room, or maybe elsewhere in the house, and that it was related in some way to those continents. But where was it? Was Robert just cleverer, after all, than I was? Or was the whole thing in some way a big joke?
I looked again at the desk itself. It was very tidy – Robert’s pen still lay parallel to the edge of the desk on the leather-bound blotter, just as he had left it. There were a few books piled on the other side – none were about Africa or South America, but I did go back to the bookshelves and check Out of Africa and a couple of books by Sir Richard Burton.
After half an hour or so, I gave up and went to find Elsie and Annabelle.
I had expected to find them in the garden. What I had not expected was the look of triumph on Elsie’s face.
Eight
Playing girl-detectives can be fun, so long as you don’t have to play under the direction of some snotty cow, to a set of rules that she is clearly making up as she goes along. Still, anything that gave Ethelred a chance to check out the library uninterrupted . . .
The slapper and I divided up the garden between us and I wandered up and down, not really knowing what I was looking for, but safe in the knowledge that the police would have already found it if it had been there.
We met again in the middle of the lawn at the extremities of our respective traverses.
‘Anything?’ I asked.
‘Nothing over here,’ she said. ‘Was there anything in the rose bed under the library window?’
‘It looked as if the police had been all over it,’ I said. ‘Big footprints everywhere. And those roses have vicious thorns. I left it out.’
‘Maybe it would be worth double-checking,’ said my new playmate.
‘OK,’ I said. Anything to give Ethelred another few minutes of uninterrupted snooping. As I approached the flower bed I could see him through the library window, tapping the panelling. That wasn’t going to get him very far-didn’t he know what a drawer looked like? Back to the job in hand anyway.
Working your way between the rose bushes was a real nuisance. They were waist high (on me anyway) and seemed determined to snag everything. Then I got lucky.
On a thorn, at about knee height, was a small scrap of cloth. I knelt down and checked it out. It was navy blue wool. A big enough chunk that you’d have thought its loss had been noticed. And it didn’t look as though it had been there that long. I called Annabelle over.
‘This could be really important evidence,’ she said, frowning. ‘We need to photograph it and then remove it with tweezers and put it in a clear bag.’
‘Or call the police?’ I said.
‘No, let’s bag the son of a bitch up,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said. It was her game of amateur detectives, after all.
I went off to the kitchen to find something suitable. When I returned, she was photographing the cloth in situ with her camera. She was taking her game seriously.
‘Of course,’ I said, tweaking the scrap off the thorn with finger and thumb (no tweezers being immediately available),‘this could be from some copper’s uniform. You said they were rampant in the roses.’
‘No, it’s got a red pinstripe running through it,’ said Annabelle. ‘This isn’t a chunk of police trousers.’
I looked more closely. There was a just-discernible hint of a thin red stripe. Annabelle had good eyes.
‘The kid who was waiting table last night was wearing blue trousers,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he was.’
‘Was he?’ Annabelle looked deeply shocked for a moment and then said: ‘No, they were plain blue – I’m sure of it. No red stripe.’
‘It’s not much of a stripe,’ I said, looking closer. To be quite honest I’d have missed it, if Annabelle hadn’t seen it and pointed it out. It was subtle. Classy even. The cloth had felt soft to the touch too – it must have been an expensive suit that had been ruined in the bushes.
‘I’m certain,’ said Annabelle. ‘None of the guests or staff was wearing anything at all like this.’
I held up the clear bag and squinted at it. ‘Odd thing to wear for a murder – navy blue pinstripe.’
‘Why?’ asked Annabelle.
‘Well, you’d think a murderer would wear serviceable black jeans and a black sweater – mask optional. Or they might wear old brown trousers and a green top to look like a walker who had just strayed off the South Downs Way and onto the Muntham estate. Blue pin-stripe isn’t quite right for casing a joint in the
country. You look out of place. People would just say: “What’s that merchant banker doing casing the joint?” They’d be onto him like a shot.’
‘Let’s check round the rhododendron bushes over there,’ said Annabelle tetchily
‘Whatever you say,’ I replied.
This was less productive from my point of view, but Annabelle quickly called me over.
‘Look!’ she said triumphantly.
On the ground were a couple of cigarette ends – filter-tips, smoked almost down to the last scrap of tobacco.
‘The murderer,’ she said, ‘must have stood here, smoking, and watching the library window for a chance to break in.’
Even if she was allowed to make up the rules of the game, that seemed to be stretching the evidence to its absolute limits. Still . . .
‘Shall I bag those too?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely.’
I guessed we were playing at being SOCOs – I’d have to check with Ethelred. I studied the ciggies briefly once they were in the bag. They looked pretty ordinary. They had no lipstick on them, suggesting a man, or maybe a woman who was not wearing lipstick at that precise moment. That ruled out a few people, but not enough to make an arrest.
‘What about the gardeners?’ I asked.
‘Neither of them smokes,’ she said. ‘At least, I don’t think they do.’
‘Robert?’
‘I didn’t allow it.’
‘OK, so we’re after a chain-smoking merchant banker with a tolerant wife,’ I said. ‘Sorry,’ I added, as Annabelle’s look told me I was not taking this as seriously as I should.
Nevertheless, it was something to go on. Somebody had been tiptoeing through the roses not that long ago and somebody had stopped for a couple of crafty cigs in a spot with a good view of the library. And the police had missed both, which was sort of careless of them.
So, when I met up with Ethelred I was feeling quite smug.
My new best friend, Annabelle, went off to make us some coffee and I had a chance to compare notes with Ethelred in the conservatory.
