by L. C. Tyler
I checked my watch. I could remain here until Annabelle chose to return or I could still just get to London in time for my meeting with Fiona McIntosh. I hesitated a moment, then drove back into Worthing and parked close to the station. I bought a day return and was soon seated in a train pursuing Elsie’s towards Victoria.
I had arranged to meet Fiona McIntosh in a cafe close to where she worked. For some reason I had expected her to opt for a skinny wet mochaccino or something else that would demonstrate urban sophistication, but she just asked me to order her a black coffee.
‘I’ve no idea what half of those things up on the board are,’ she said. ‘I suspect the people who work here don’t know either.’
I returned to our table clutching two large mugs.
‘They’re called Americanos,’ I said.
‘I wonder when people stopped drinking coffee,’ she said. ‘So, unless you’ve travelled up to London just to buy me an Americano, what can I do for you in return?’
‘I just need to know slightly more about the discovery of Robert’s body,’ I said.
‘Well, entering as you did via the window, you beat me to it by a good thirty seconds. I guess you already know at least as much as I do.’
‘I didn’t examine him as closely as you did.’
‘Yes, but you’d probably had less to drink than I had. Quite a lot less, actually.’
‘You would still have seen things I missed. I’m not a doctor.’
‘So you’re not,’ conceded Fiona McIntosh. She put her coffee down and looked me in the eye. ‘Very well, Robert died of asphyxiation as a result of a thin cord being wound tightly round his neck. No doubt the CSI people would have preferred me to leave it in place, but trying to save lives gets to be a habit unless you’re careful. So, there’ll be no photographs of the ligature in situ, I’m afraid, and only my hazy recollection of events to help you. I do remember, however, that there was a pencil inserted in the cord, which had first been used to tighten the noose and then fixed behind Robert’s ear to hold it in place. It’s not the commonest form of suicide, but there are recorded cases. It’s quite effective if you can get a few minutes to yourself and there are no busybodies around to revive you. With the cord removed, you could see there were slight abrasions of the neck, entirely consistent with the apparent cause of death. No petechiae on the skin or eyes, as I recall, but that doesn’t really prove anything one way or the other. Death by strangulation, without any doubt at all.’
‘Annabelle doesn’t . . .’
‘. . . doesn’t like to think it was suicide? Yes, I know. But for it to be murder, as I think Colin pointed out, surely there should have been some sign of a struggle? A chair overturned would have been good, if slightly clichéd. Everything was, however, remarkably tidy, down to the pen on the desk.’
‘I was thinking – perhaps Robert knew his killer? Perhaps he was overcome before he realized what was happening?’
‘Well, as you are aware, people do tend to know their killers a lot of the time. Strangers may murder you for the cash in your wallet, but the potential for pissing off your friends is considerable. Still, you’d have to know somebody very well indeed before you’d let them wind a cord round your neck and tighten it with a 3B pencil.’
‘Facetiousness to one side,’ I began.
‘Who’s being facetious? I can’t say I’m into that type of game myself. I don’t think Colin is either, though if he ever brings a length of cord to bed with him, I’ll probably decline. But some people do get a kick out of asphyxiation, so I’m told. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of game that can go badly wrong.’
‘You’re not suggesting . . .’
‘. . . that a member of the British aristocracy would engage in kinky sex? No, I’m sure that’s never happened before. Especially to one with the nickname “Shagger”.’
‘Facetiousness, as I said, to one side, there was no evidence . . .’
‘. . . of any sexual practices, deviant or otherwise? You’re quite right. He died with his boots on and his trousers in place. In summary, there was no evidence either that Robert had resisted or that he had welcomed the killer’s attentions. Where does that leave us?’
‘I don’t know. Where does it leave us?’
She paused, doubtless summoning up the key points from some long-past course on How to Break Bad News.
‘It was suicide, Ethelred. Suicide, pure and simple. Nobody could have got out of that room.’
‘There is a secret passage,’ I said.
‘So, that’s the solution to the locked-room mystery? A secret passage? How boring.’
‘The solutions to most locked-room mysteries tend to be a bit of a let-down. It’s rather like having a conjuring trick explained to you.’
‘Well, that does open up other possibilities, I suppose. Assuming there was somebody who, one way or another, could get the rope round Robert’s neck, they could have rendered him unconscious in ten seconds or so. They would not have needed to hang around until he was dead – just left him as he was and hopped back into this secret passage and off to the billiard room. She could have been back with the other guests in no time,’ said Fiona.
‘She?’
‘Or he, of course, but I’m still thinking of Robert not objecting while somebody playfully ties a rope round his neck.’
We both contemplated this image for a moment.
‘Annabelle says she didn’t know the passage was there,’ I said. ‘We discovered it after Robert’s death.’
‘Did Robert know it was there?’
‘I don’t know – one end was in his library, after all.’
‘It’s a shame he can’t just tell us.’
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of the trail of obscure clues he had laid for me. ‘Yes, it would be good if he could just do that.’
‘Well, if that’s all I can do for you . . .’ Fiona began.
‘Almost,’ I said. I paused, wondering how to get round to the main purpose of my visit. It hadn’t troubled me when Elsie had first mentioned it, but it had weighed on my mind since.
‘You and Robert saw a lot of each other last year,’ I said.
‘Is that what he told you?’
‘No, I saw the entries in his diary.’
‘I didn’t know he kept one.’
‘Just a simple appointments diary, but “FM” appears quite often.’
‘He was an old friend,’ she said. ‘We would meet up for coffee. Very often we would meet up exactly here. This cafe, this table.’
‘Twice or three times a week?’
‘Yes. He was lonely, Ethelred. He had problems he didn’t seem to be able to discuss with anyone else. Sometimes he just wanted to talk about the past to take his mind off the present. After the bank sacked him he was a bit of a lost soul. Didn’t he ever drop round and have coffee with you for no apparent reason?’
‘Quite often,’ I said. ‘Decaffeinated.’
‘There you are then,’ she said. ‘And Ethelred . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘It was suicide.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said.
I left Fiona to return to her hospital and to her operating list for the afternoon. I had a second visit to pay, close by.
I walked along Euston Road to the British Library. I wanted to consult a paper by Professor Keith Simpson in an old volume of the International Criminal Police Review. The Internet is all very well, but it lacks the authority of a leather-bound tome, read within the hallowed walls of one of the greatest libraries in the world. Professor Simpson had described in detail six cases of suicide by self-strangulation. In one case a son had narrowly avoided conviction for the death of his mother, so like murder had it seemed. Another case involved the use of a pencil to tighten the ligature. I also wanted to remind myself of the circumstances surrounding the death of General Pichegru – one of Napoleon’s generals, found strangled under similar circumstances and another suicide.
Fiona McIntosh seemed as
keen to believe that it was suicide as Annabelle seemed keen to believe it was murder. Though it was easy to understand why Annabelle would not wish it to be suicide, it was difficult to see that Fiona’s conclusions were based on anything other than the medical evidence. Of all the guests assembled that evening, she at least seemed to have no axe, or any other type of murder weapon, to grind.
Twenty-two
It’s a long trip back to London from Worthing, and it gave me a bit of thinking time. My theory about Annabelle conspiring with John O’Brian obviously needed a bit more work.
Though I was convinced that Annabelle had lied about the passage, there was another flaw in my argument that Ethelred had generously not pointed out. There is nothing so irritating for any wife as to find that you have just murdered a husband who only had a month or two to live anyway. Annabelle must have suspected how ill Shagger was, even if he hadn’t told her the whole story. Calculating bitches don’t chip their nail varnish unless they absolutely have to. Annabelle would have just let things take their natural course, not hastened them with a bit of rope.
I couldn’t help feeling, though, that this murder had a woman’s hand in it somewhere. Men shoot each other or bludgeon each other to death. Strangulation with a slender cord wound tenderly round the neck has that feminine touch sadly missing from so many modern-day killings. What I really needed to focus on was which of the women, other than Annabelle, might have wanted Robert dead. Felicity Hooper was, when you thought about it, the one with the motive – cruelly abandoned and left to the mercies of some backstreet abortionist. Why shouldn’t she have resented Shagger Muntham’s rise to fame and riches? Why shouldn’t she have earnestly wished him dead? And she had no way of knowing that Shagger was on his way to the Happy Hunting Ground without her help. So, to conclude, why shouldn’t she have taken the opportunity to strangle him – having first loudly pointed out that the lack of security at Muntham Court could have allowed any number of murderers in? And, thinking about it, having cleverly ensured that Ethelred and I would remain in the dining room . . .
The best way to tell what a writer is thinking is to read their books. But I had foolishly returned the relevant MS half-read. My life as an agent has been singularly without regrets, but in this case I now realized I had been over-hasty I urgently needed to find out how that novel had ended.
It was the work of a moment to slip into WH Smith at Victoria and locate a copy of Abandoned! by Felicity Hooper. I wasn’t sure whether the curvy but slightly dishevelled young lady on the front cover was supposed to be modelled on La Hooper when she was just a chit of a girl – but I rather suspected that it was. I flicked quickly to the end, but the heroine was just sitting on a cliff-top, reflecting on the fact that things could have gone worse. I worked backwards looking for the murder of a rugby-playing tosser and – bingo! – somebody was being taunted and then pushed off Folly Bridge into the swirling floodwaters below. ‘One arm, encased in the sleeve of a Balliol rugby jersey, rose briefy above the foam, then I saw nothing except the powerfully f owing Isis. “Bobby!” I exclaimed.’
‘Are you planning to pay for that or just read it?’ asked the assistant in the nasal tones of South London.
‘Worth every penny,’ I said, slapping a fiver on the counter (the book was, inevitably, on special offer).
‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ confided the assistant, handing me my change. ‘I’ve read all her books. Did you know she’s signing copies of her new best-seller at our shop down the road this afternoon? You should go along.’
‘I might just do that,’ I said.
It looked like a pretty average book-signing. There was no queue of any description in front of the small table at which Felicity Hooper was sitting. A sign propped up close by featured her photograph and quoted (under the banner ‘Praise for Felicity Hooper’) some of the more enthusiastic reviews for earlier work. She was slowly and dutifully autographing a pile of books that would later go on the shelves with a label saying ‘Signed by Author’. Excellent – I would be able to get her full attention. I approached the table like a silent but deadly nemesis and thrust the book under her nose.
‘Who should I put that it’s to?’ she asked, glancing up. ‘Oh, it’s you.’
She gave me a look as though I was a complete arsehole.
‘I was just passing,’ I said. ‘I thought I would get you to sign my copy of Abandoned! I did so enjoy it – especially the bit just before the end.’
One of the conventions of a book-signing is that you have to sign the books, even for complete arseholes. She shrugged and was scribbling her name when I said: ‘I’d also like you to write a line from the book.’
Book collectors like their ‘signed, lined and dated’ copies, so she expressed no surprise but just replied: ‘Which line?’
I opened the book close to the end. ‘I thought this bit, where you say: “You pillock, did you really think I’d let you get away with that?” It’s just before she pushes him off the bridge.’
‘He overbalances and falls. He’s drunk. She doesn’t kill him – though she does blame herself. There’s not really any need for her to feel guilty. One useless man fewer in the world – no great disaster. Anyway, if that’s what you would like me to write, it’s your book.’ She applied her pen to the page and started writing the quotation.
‘Is that what you said to Robert?’
‘To Robert?’ She stopped writing and looked up at me.
‘In the library.’
‘By the time I got to the library, Robert was dead. I didn’t say anything to him as far as I remember.’ She put down the pen and looked me in the eye.
‘The second time you went to the library that evening, maybe, but not the first time,’ I said.
‘What doyou mean?’
‘Did you take the rope with you or was it there already?’
‘I think you’ll find it’s Cluedo in which the weapons are randomly scattered through the house. Elsie, I went to the library once in my life and once only. Are you implying that I killed Robert?’ She looked round the shop. It was almost empty, but this clearly wasn’t the type of conversation writers, or their publishers, want overheard by paying customers.
‘Didn’t you kill him?’ I asked. No point in beating about the bush, I always say.
‘Why should I?’
‘He abandoned you.’ I put a lot of emphasis on the word ‘abandoned’. I indicated the cover of the book in front of us in case she missed the point.
‘Yes. You can stop tapping the book like that – I do get the literary allusion.’
‘You were pregnant.’
‘I was on the pill. I wasn’t that stupid.’
‘You had an abortion.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘I’ve read the book.’
‘I know. I sent you the manuscript.’
‘It is clearly based on your own experiences.’
‘In my latest novel, the heroine wins the Badminton Horse Trials. I’m not claiming anyone’s mounted me with a whip and bridle.’
‘But this was your first. All writers put their own experiences into their first book. It’s like dogs returning to their own vomit, but slightly less uplifting.’
‘I was a physio in Oxford. That’s about it for autobiographical content. Oh, and I do actually like Liebfraumilch, an authentic bit of seventies detail.’
‘No pregnancy?’
‘No pregnancy.’
‘No abortion?’
‘Difficult without the pregnancy.’
‘You had the opportunity to murder Robert.’
‘Yes, but I opted for a pee instead. I’d do the same again.’
‘Huh! So you say.’
‘You never give up, do you?’
‘No.’
‘God, Elsie, you get on my tits. Would you like me to sign them for you?’
I turned round. A customer was politely hovering, two new hard-backs in hand.
‘Yes, could you sign them,
please? Could you make this one out to “Darren”. He’s my boyfriend. I don’t read your books myself. The other one’s for my mother. She doesn’t read you either but she does like signed books – you’d be amazed at the rubbish she’s got.’
Felicity Hooper smiled weakly and handed me back my copy of Abandoned! As I was leaving the shop I checked the signature. It read: ‘For Elsie. You pillock. Felicity Hooper.’ Well, that should sell for more than a fiver on eBay.
Twenty-three
On the Tube back to Hampstead, I glanced at my new purchase from time to time and reminded myself of the basic plot – a girl seduced and betrayed by a rugby-playing bounder who later meets a sticky end. As I had suspected – not really all that autobiographical then. Perhaps however it was, quite coincidentally, somebody else’s story? I knew that Jane Smith was a former, but much more recent, girlfriend of Shagger’s. Had I been barking up the wrong tree? Was it Jane Smith who harboured the murderous grudge and had a bit of rope she wouldn’t need again?
I knew the Smiths lived in Crawley. Possibly they were back from their autumn break, or whatever it was. The online phone directory gave eighteen people called ‘G Smith’ in the Crawley area. Most of them were in that evening and I had pissed off thirteen people by the time I got lucky.
‘Hello,’ said a voice that I recognized as Jane Smith’s.
‘Elsie Thirkettle here,’ I said, as I hadn’t on thirteen previous occasions.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Then there was silence. Guilty conscience?
