The Herring in the Library

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘You are a great comfort.’

  ‘That’s my job. So, how’s the book going?’

  ‘Master Thomas is in Sussex. He’s been stitched up by somebody.’

  ‘An evil woman?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’d been thinking that Lady Catherine was behind it all, but I’m beginning to feel she is innocent.’

  ‘I bet she’s not. Where is Master Thomas now?’

  ‘He’s about to be dragged off to some dungeon and be tortured.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t know. He’s been duped.’

  ‘Silly tosser,’ said Elsie.

  At Bramber

  Thomas had, in the course of his work, been granted the opportunity to visit several castles and inspect the different parts of them, including (though purely in passing, and as briefly as he decently could) the dungeon. Dungeons were, in his view, not happy places. They lacked most of the things that made life comfortable. What little they possessed was designed for the most part to make life distinctly unpleasant. Their long-term residents had appeared despondent, even those who were unchained. Staying out of dungeons seemed a good rule to follow. Unfortunately, he had just broken that rule.

  Thomas had been permitted to ride his own horse to Bramber Castle, though what had happened to the animal since he had dismounted in the courtyard, he had little idea. He had also been deprived of his sausage-cutting Excalibur. Introductions had been made during the journey to the extent that he knew that he had been detained by the Sheriff of Sussex and two of his men, but all three seemed to feel that they could wait until they were in the dungeon to get better acquainted with Thomas. And even then, they were happy to prevaricate until the following day. Maybe their chambers elsewhere in the castle were drier and warmer and maybe they were not awoken from time to time by rats running across their faces. It was only a guess on Thomas’s part.

  Now Thomas was seated on a low three-legged stool and the three men were standing facing him. It was perhaps morning or perhaps early afternoon of the day after his arrest. It was difficult to say down here. Possibly at some stage he would be able to ask.

  ‘Master Thomas,’ said the Sheriff, ‘you are aware of the seriousness of your position?’

  ‘I am aware that I am under arrest. That is sometimes serious.’

  ‘You do not ask by what authority?’

  ‘You are armed and I am not. That is usually authority enough. I am curious to know the charges. But only if it is agreeable to you gentlemen to tell me.’

  ‘You will be charged with the murder of Sir Edmund de Muntham.’

  ‘Thank you. I am very obliged to you for clearing up that small matter. The only thing I am still unsure of is why you should think I might wish to murder Sir Edmund.’

  ‘You covet his wife.’

  ‘I already have one wife. I really have no need for another. I am told that Mohammedans are permitted several wives, but they clearly have a stronger constitution than we Christians.’

  ‘You wrote Lady Catherine de Muntham a poem.’

  ‘I would not presume to do any such thing. She is a great lady and I am merely a humble—’

  ‘—clerk-yes, we know.’

  ‘—customs officer, I was going to say.’

  ‘You lie, Master Thomas. We have seen the poem. Lady Catherine gave us the manuscript that you brought with you from London.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But I merely copied it out, with one or two minor improvements of my own. My master, Geoffrey Chaucer – a far superior poet, as he frequently tells me – wrote the verses and asked me to make a facsimile of them and give it to her . . .’

  The Sheriff held up a gloved palm, its fingers spread. Thomas noticed that the leather was soft, but already darkened and marked from handling the reins and the sword. ‘You came to Findon to murder Sir Edmund out of jealousy. You detained him with a letter that purported to come from the King, but that was in fact some piece of nonsense that you concocted.’

  ‘No, I must assure you, it is genuine.’

  ‘The message asked him to watch for smugglers, did it not?’

  ‘Yes, as I recall.’

  ‘Is it likely that the King would trouble Sir Edmund in this way? You detained him, I say, with this pretended message from the King, while his men rode off onto the downs to hunt. You followed Sir Edmund and overtook him.’

  ‘Overtook him? On my horse? You do Sir Edmund, and his horse, a grave injustice.’

  ‘You found another pretext to approach him, then stabbed him through the heart with your dagger and returned to Muntham Court, feigning to await his return. Though offered the hospitality of Lady Catherine, you declined it and showed every sign of being anxious to flee from the county before your crime was discovered.’

  ‘No, it was Lady Catherine who urged me to leave, while I said that—’

  ‘You lie, Master Thomas, and you lie badly.’

  ‘I lie badly – you are quite right, I really must learn how to lie better. In the meantime I have little choice but to tell you the truth.’

  ‘There are ways of ensuring that men are truthful’

  ‘Yes, I believe you mentioned that. Yesterday, or the day before, depending on how long I have been here.’

  ‘You have, I assume, been shown the instruments of torture?’

  ‘Somebody kindly offered to do so, but I told him not to trouble himself. I am an officer of the crown. I am broadly aware of the range of instruments available to you. I have no wish to be better acquainted with them.’

  ‘Then, Master Thomas, you would do well to tell us the truth now rather than later.’

  ‘As I say . . . I have told you all that I know.’

  ‘You do not seem to appreciate the seriousness of your position. I am not sure whether you are brave or stupid.’

  ‘Not brave, unfortunately. But hopefully not stupid either. I have no more wish to be tortured than anyone else. If you gentlemen intended to harm me, however, then I think you would have already done so. My horse could, after all, have stumbled in the icy road and thrown me, breaking my neck. These things happen. You had no need to bring me here to kill me.’

  ‘We have not brought you here to kill you, clerk – we have brought you here to discover the truth.’

  ‘But you are intelligent gentlemen. I doubt that you really believe that a clerk, particularly a clerk with so little interest in tales of chivalry, would single-handedly overcome a battle-hardened soldier like Sir Edmund. Nor do I think you believe that Lady Catherine would have the slightest interest in me. Though, I must confess, I find my face pleasing enough, few ladies share that view. Torturing me would be unlikely to reveal anything that you did not know and returning me to my master the King in an imperfect state might be inconvenient for you.’

  ‘Might it?’ asked the Sheriff, with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Yes, I really think it might. If I were guilty of treason it would be another matter, of course.’

  ‘You mean,’ said the Sheriff, permitting himself the briefest of smiles, ‘that an innocent man has nothing to fear?’

  ‘Dear me, no. I am not so naïve as to think that,’ said Thomas. ‘So, let me ask you a question that I have frequently found useful under circumstances such as these: what is it precisely that I can do for you good gentlemen?’

  ‘You can tell us the truth, you insolent quill-driver,’ growled one of the flanking men at arms, but he was promptly silenced by the chief questioner.

  ‘How helpful were you offering to be?’ asked the Sheriff.

  ‘As helpful as I need to be to get out of here without being tortured.’

  The Sheriff considered this.

  ‘We know,’ he said very carefully, ‘that Sir Edmund was murdered by a man dressed as a clerk. We have a witness, who is willing to swear to this.’

  ‘How fortunate,’ said Thomas, nervously rubbing his hands together. ‘How fortunate.’

  ‘As long as there is only one witness, of course, there is always
some room for doubt,’ continued the Sheriff. ‘Our witness is a man of impeccable honesty, family, integrity, appearance, smell and so on and so forth, but that may not stop some people questioning the accuracy of his statement. In view of the frequency with which he has given evidence for the Crown in court, you would think that people would trust him, but we live in a sadly cynical world. And it is important that this matter is cleared up as soon as possible. We would not wish, for example, for suspicion to fall on some innocent party because of doubts about the identification of the killer. That would, to use your own expression, be inconvenient. We would not want that. I am sure you would not want that.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Thomas, rubbing his hands now with some speed. ‘I most certainly would not want that.’

  ‘Of course, there would be no such doubts if we had apprehended this criminal clerk. Or, now I think about it, if we had a second witness of equally impeccable character, who was willing to swear that he too had seen this person.’

  ‘Seen them in the act of murdering Sir Edmund?’

  ‘Not necessarily, if the witness felt unable to recall such an event. It might be sufficient that the reliable witness had seen a clerk, of medium height, dressed in a black gown and a grey hood, loitering in the woods above Muntham Court late in the forenoon.’

  ‘Just so. Could it be that the reliable witness had seen this clerk, with an ink-black robe and a hood the colour of summer thunderclouds, half-concealed amongst the trees, clutching a gleaming and deadly blade? And that the witness overheard the clerk muttering terrible threats against Sir Edmund?’

  ‘I think the reliable witness would be wise to stick to a simple and unembroidered statement.’

  ‘Strangely,’ said Master Thomas, ‘I think I could have seen somebody dressed exactly in the manner you describe, while I was speaking to Sir Edmund. He was half-concealed in the bushes a little way ahead of us, and vanished off before we had finished our conversation.’

  ‘You presumably thought little of it at the time, and therefore had no need to warn Sir Edmund? You returned to Muntham Court immediately?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I have taken the words out of your mouth?’

  ‘No, quite the reverse, I assure you,’ said Thomas.

  ‘I shall have a statement drawn up for you to sign,’ said the Sheriff. ‘You saw a clerk with a grey hood.’

  ‘I’d prefer a hood the colour of thunderclouds on a summer’s day.’

  ‘Grey,’ said the Sheriff. ‘You could of course stay here until we have some summer thunderclouds to compare the hood with – or we could just say it was grey. As the other witness did.’

  ‘On reflection, I remember it as merely grey. And while I am waiting for this document to be drawn up, perhaps I might have some breakfast if it is breakfast-time, or dinner if it is dinner-time?’

  ‘You may have both,’ said the Sheriff, generously.

  Fourteen

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Elsie.

  I shut the top of my computer immediately.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’ It’s a thing I have. You don’t say any more than you have to about any work in progress. It was certainly much too soon to share it with Elsie.

  ‘Has Master Thomas been tortured yet?’

  ‘As much as he needs to be.’

  ‘I’m sure I could give you a hand,’ she said. ‘I’m good at plots.’

  ‘I can manage on my own. Thanks.’

  Some time before we had written a book jointly. It was an experience I wanted to forget.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this suspect,’ said Elsie, changing tack, as she so often did.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The guy with the blue suit and beanie.’

  ‘Two witnesses saw him,’ I said.

  ‘Two witnesses say they saw him.’

  ‘I can’t see that John O’Brian and Clive Brent would concoct a story together.’

  ‘Not when they are rivals for the attention of Mrs Shagger. Don’t pull that face – you know as well as I do that she was sleeping with one or both. But I agree – they don’t seem to be likely conspirators. So maybe there really was somebody wearing a blue suit in the grounds that evening. Of course, it doesn’t make him the murderer.’

  ‘It would be good,’ I said, ‘just to have some sort of independent corroboration that there was such a person.’

  My mobile rang. It was Annabelle.

  ‘Ethelred,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some really good news. We’ve found the beanie.’

  The light was beginning to fade by the time we got back to Muntham Court. Annabelle and Dave Peart were waiting for us in the garden.

  ‘He found it in the shrubbery,’ said Annabelle. ‘Didn’t you?’

  Dave Peart, to whom this last remark had been addressed, gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually.

  ‘It was very clever of him,’ she added.

  I took the beanie from Annabelle. It was made of black wool and looked pretty new – the sort of anonymous headgear you can pick up in any market for a fiver or so. It felt warm in my hand.

  ‘Show Mr Tressider where you found it,’ said Annabelle.

  Dave Peart gave another shrug and set off across the lawn towards the shrubbery. We went several yards into the mass of overgrown bushes before he pointed to a spot on the ground, just short of the garden wall.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘On top of them leaves there, just by the old wall, isn’t it?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to examine the spot or nothing?’

  ‘There doesn’t seem a lot to examine,’ I said. ‘Just leaves.’

  ‘Thought you was some sort of detective.’

  ‘I’m some sort of crime writer,’ I said.

  I knelt down and immediately regretted it as I felt the damp start to seep into the knees of my trousers. I gave the leaves a cursory inspection. I got up again.

  ‘The garden wall would be easy to climb,’ I said. ‘It would seem likely that the intruder dropped the beanie here as he was going over the wall, or maybe as he was looking for the easiest place to climb it.’

  The spot was well hidden from the house, as it was from the rest of the garden. This would be a good place to slip over the wall – a good place to vanish afterwards. I had no intention of climbing over it myself, but, placing my hands on the smooth flints that topped it and one shoe in a convenient gap lower down, I pulled myself up far enough to see what was on the other side. A muddy footpath hugged it for twenty or thirty yards, coming from (as far as I could tell) the main road and veering away upwards and onto the downs in the other direction.

  ‘I’ll give you a leg up if you want,’ offered Dave from behind me.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ I said, dropping back down. ‘Where does that path go?’

  ‘Storrington, I’d say. Can’t think why anyone would go there that way, though, when there’s a perfectly good road. Unless they was poaching or something.’

  ‘It would take you there through the woods,’ I said. ‘You could slip away unnoticed.’

  ‘Who’s going to notice you on the road anyway?’ asked Dave. ‘You drive past some geezer walking along the grass verge. You don’t see his face or nothing. Or he could leave his car in the village – round the side of Winton’s store. No point in slogging over the downs to ruddy Storrington. It’d take you the better part of an hour.’

  ‘What does it matter whether he went to Storrington or to Worthing or to anywhere else?’ interrupted Annabelle. ‘The point is that we have two reliable witnesses who saw the man, and now this evidence that he really was here. Ethelred, we should phone the police now and tell them what you have discovered. They can take over from here.’

  ‘Whatever you wish—’ I began to say.

  ‘We haven’t talked to Gillian Maggs,’ said Elsie.

  ‘True but—’ I said.

  ‘I am sure that she saw nothing,’ said An
nabelle.

  ‘Not much effort to give her a call,’ said Elsie. ‘Probably still time to do it tonight.’

  ‘She goes to bed very early,’ said Annabelle.

  ‘We could call her early tomorrow then,’ said Elsie.

  They stood facing each other. Neither appeared to be blinking.

  ‘I’ll ring her myself,’ said Annabelle, ‘and ask her to phone you tomorrow.’

  ‘So, we’ll delay going to the police?’ I asked.

  ‘Entirely as you wish, Ethelred,’ said Annabelle. She turned sharply on her heel and strode off towards the house.

  ‘There’s gratitude,’ said Elsie.

  ‘She must be very tired,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Very. Nice beanie though,’ she added, pointing to the object that I still held in my hand. ‘That would keep you warm and dry.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Elsie gave me one of her despairing looks.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Time for us to go home,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you need to get back to London?’

  ‘Thought I might stay another day,’ she said. ‘The weather’s improving now.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  And she gave me another despairing look.

  The Holy Sister

  Thomas made the return journey to Muntham Court without an escort and with the bare minimum of instructions. More snow had fallen while he had been at the castle, but now the sun shone from an ice-blue sky. His horse’s hooves crunched through the snow, following a long, snaking trail left by an earlier traveller – a traveller who hopefully knew roughly where he was going. At Washington he asked for further directions. By late afternoon he was back at Findon.

  ‘My lady has gone to Chichester on urgent business,’ said a servant. ‘But we have another guest, caught in last night’s storm and happily still with us – a holy sister, from a convent near London. She is warming herself by the fire. If you would like to join her, I will bring you some mulled wine.’

  Thomas had rarely felt comfortable around holiness. To attend the occasional Mass was a necessity, but he was as happy avoiding priests as not. A nun or an abbess, or whatever she was, was likely to be dull company for a long winter evening. Thomas had not examined the state of his soul recently, but he was fairly sure that it was in good order and did not require maintenance at present. Still, it would be impolite not to greet the lady in a suitably decorous manner and perhaps ask for her blessing.