The Herring in the Library

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Then you got John O’Brian and Clive Brent to lie, telling each that the other had definitely seen this person.’

  ‘They were so keen to help me, Ethelred. They were really sweet. And when I thought about it, it was so much more convincing having two people see the killer.’

  ‘Then you planted that material on the rose bushes.’

  ‘A bit of one of Robert’s old suits. I destroyed the suit itself so it wouldn’t be traceable.’

  ‘And the cigarette butts.’

  ‘From that gardening boy we employ, whatever he’s called. He leaves them all over the place.’

  ‘He’s called Dave Peart.’

  ‘Is he? Yes, of course. So he is.’

  ‘You said he didn’t smoke.’

  ‘A slip of the tongue.’

  ‘Didn’t it worry you that DNA testing might incriminate him? It would have been easy for the police to identify who had smoked them.’

  ‘Might it? You know so much about these things. I certainly had not planned for him to come to any more harm than was absolutely necessary.’

  ‘And you planted the black beanie.’

  ‘It was a pound at a shop in Worthing.’

  ‘The price is immaterial,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Clive or John, I can’t remember which, came up with the bit about the beanie. I thought it was jolly good so I went straight into Worthing . . . but I really am sorry, Ethelred. I realize now that was wrong too. I should have taken you into my confidence so much earlier. Dear Ethelred, I do so need your help.’

  I realized that her hand had been on my knee for some time, but couldn’t remember her placing it there.

  ‘What did you do with Gillian Maggs?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. Well, not much. She was the one who told me about the secret passage. She’d worked for the last people who lived here. After they both died and the family put it on the market, she was possibly the only person alive who knew about the passage. She told me, of course. I’ve always got on well with Gilly. Anyway, I realized that it might be awkward for her if she had to talk to the police . . . I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed in any way . . . and Robert and I have a little place in Barbados. So I sent her there for a short holiday. Or possibly a long one, depending on when this silly business is all cleared up.’

  ‘And the daughter?’

  ‘She phoned me to say that she was worried by the questions you and Elise had been asking.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told her to stay put until the courier arrived with a first-class ticket to Barbados.’

  ‘Annabelle, I’m sorry to ask you this, but were you . . . in a relationship . . . with John O’Brian or Clive Brent?’

  ‘Ethelred, I swear on Robert’s life – or my mother’s life if you prefer. No. Absolutely not. They are both dear boys and I think that they may have both been just a teensy bit in love with me – but I adored my husband. Ethelred, you couldn’t imagine, even for a moment . . .’

  ‘Why did you sack John O’Brian?’

  ‘Didn’t he explain? I just couldn’t afford him any more. I couldn’t keep him on and not pay him. Perhaps I explained myself badly – I was cross about the will and with you and perhaps with men generally. I may have been a little abrupt with him.’

  ‘It wasn’t that you had just ended an affair with him . . .’

  ‘Oh, Ethelred. An affair? You are too cruel, too . . . I couldn’t bear it if you thought that badly of me.’

  Suddenly she flung herself at me and started weeping uncontrollably. I felt her hot tears run down my own cheek.

  ‘I don’t think badly of you, Annabelle,’ I said, though her hair was all over my face, making clear speech tricky, and she was holding onto me quite tightly. Her cheek rubbed damply against mine. Somehow our mouths touched. I tasted the salt of her tears and inhaled her perfume. Again the image of a Venus flytrap unaccountably crossed my mind.

  ‘Ethelred,’ she breathed into my ear, as though something had just occurred to her. ‘You can help me. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve still gathered lots of good evidence, haven’t we? All you need to do is to take it to the police. Tell them where we found it. And about the secret passage that you so cleverly found. And then perhaps say that you saw a stranger in the garden – that you had thought nothing of it at the time, but now you remembered.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be true,’ I said, briefly disengaging myself.

  ‘Some of it would be.’

  ‘It’s called perverting the course of justice. At the very least it’s wasting police time.’

  ‘Wasting their time? Not if it helps them get back my insurance money for me. If I’d had a cheap ring stolen, the police would spend time looking for it, wouldn’t they? Well, I’ve lost my insurance money, and that’s a jolly sight more important. What do I pay my council tax for?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I said.

  ‘Please?’ she said. She kissed my cheek. ‘Please?’

  ‘Annabelle, I’m not sure we should be doing this . . . or that . . . and certainly not that . . . though obviously I’m very flattered that you should . . .’

  ‘I’ve always been so fond of you, Ethelred. Ever since we met. I’ve always found crime writers irresistibly attractive. Most women do.’

  How could I doubt her sincerity? I looked at her. She looked at me.

  Then, very slowly, she started to unbutton her blouse . . .

  Twenty-nine

  ‘You took your time,’ I said, as Ethelred came through the door, looking a little bedraggled. His shirt was buttoned up all wrong (which strangely I had not noticed that morning) and his hair was a complete mess, even for him. He slumped down beside me on the sofa.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He looked tired, poor lamb.

  ‘What’s that aftershave you’re wearing?’ I demanded. ‘It smells a bit girly.’

  ‘I’m not wearing aftershave,’ he said.

  ‘I can smell something on you,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe just the soap I used at Annabelle’s.’

  ‘Expensive soap then – smells just like Chanel,’ I said. ‘Did you get a good look round the place?’

  ‘Just a sitting room and a bedroom,’ he said.

  ‘So, what did she say?’

  ‘She admitted to faking the evidence. She wants me to lie to the police so that she can get the insurance money. The insurance people won’t pay up if it’s suicide.’

  ‘So, that’s what it was all about.’

  ‘From beginning to end.’

  ‘Excellent, let’s get on the phone to the cops now and grass her up.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ asked Ethelred, ignoring my suggestion.

  ‘No, I’ll have some chocolate,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry – I forgot to get any. There’s just regular coffee and decaf

  ‘Decaf then.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of that. Haven’t touched it since Robert last came round.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Where does coffee come from?’

  ‘Tesco,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘I mean which countries?’

  ‘I don’t know – it probably says on the jar. Kenya? Brazil?’

  ‘Ethelred – think back. Shagger’s poem – “What you must seek is not so very far, From Andes hills or Afric slopes, a jar” – that has to be it. How did it end?’

  ‘Something, something, something “crave” – “You shall receive where formerly you gave”.’

  ‘And where did you give Shagger coffee?’

  ‘I’ll look in the kitchen,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. Ethelred could faff around for ever. I took the jar of decaf from the cupboard, removed the top and upended it over the work surface. Nestling snugly amongst the rich brown grains was a tightly folded sheet of paper.

  ‘Robert must have hidden it there when he was last at the flat,’ said
Ethelred.

  ‘OK,’ I said, carefully unfolding what proved to be an A5 sheet, closely written on both sides. ‘This is the piece of evidence that you’ve had all along, and that would have saved us three days of arsing around, had you found it straight away. Which you didn’t.’

  And, with no little curiosity, we proceeded to read Shagger’s Last Note.

  Thirty

  Dear Ethelred,

  If you are reading this, then you have cleverly cracked the clues – or more likely you just felt like a mug of decaf

  Anyway, as you will have gathered, the point of this letter is that I want to make sure things don’t go wrong. Let’s do a bit of explaining then, in case you haven’t picked up some obvious points on the way – you never were the brightest of my chums, but hopefully you won’t make a complete pig’s ear out of this.

  First, it won’t have escaped your notice that my good lady is hopping in and out of bed with a number of my other chums. Second, you will have been told that I have only a month or two to live – even without my clever little wheeze (about which, more in a moment). Finally, you will have probably worked out that I am flat broke. I’ve still got plenty of wonga tied up in Muntham Court and the places in Chelsea and Barbados, but the point has come where I have no ready cash whatsoever, and banks like a contribution towards one or other of your mortgages from time to time. They are threatening to foreclose on Muntham Court. I never did like bankers.

  Annabelle’s solution to the problem has been straightforward enough. She made me take out a large life insurance policy – before I found out that I was poorly, by the way, so it’s all kosher. Now she’s sitting there waiting for the money to roll in so she can go off with Clive or John or whoever takes her fancy.

  Then I thought – why let her get away with it? I considered cancelling or defaulting on the insurance payments, but I reckoned some officious insurance clerk would immediately alert her to what I had done and she’d say it was a mistake and just get Clive to stump up for a month or two until I snuffed it. So, I examined the small print and – what do you know? – the policy is invalid if I commit suicide. Well, Colin has told me that the time I’ve got left won’t be much fun anyway, so I can kill two birds with one stone, as it were – one of the birds being my good self. Of course, a low-key private suicide might be rigged to look like natural causes or even murder, and I can’t have that.

  So, I am planning to kill myself in a way that will leave nothing open to doubt. I shall invite round a few chosen chums to my Last Supper. Annabelle won’t know or appreciate it, but I’ll be serving some decent wine, including my last magnum of Lafite, which I’ve been saving up for a suitable occasion. At some appropriate point in the evening, happy and well refreshed, I shall go off and do away with myself – I haven’t quite decided how, though I am of the opinion that shooting is messy and that most poisons are not half as much fun as Agatha Christie makes out. Anyway, it will take place in a locked room that no murderer could have escaped from and with lots of good reliable witnesses. You’ll be one of them. I do hope you all have a nice evening.

  Of course, there’ll be a bit of money left, when everything is sold up, that Annabelle might still get her dirty mitts on – but I’ve got a plan for that too. I’m leaving Muntham Court to you, free of encumbrances and death duties. You don’t particularly deserve it, and I won’t pretend I ever really liked you, but I think that good fortune should fall on people as randomly as possible without any regard to merit. So, enjoy it – you are now Lord of the Manor.

  Of course, the upkeep will probably bankrupt you and Annabelle will hate you for ever – and you rather like Annabelle, don’t you? – but that won’t be my problem.

  Oh, and there’s one other sting in the tail. The obvious solution to Annabelle’s problem is to marry you and to continue to be the Lady of Muntham Court. She usually gets what she wants and you’re pretty spineless, so my money, if I still had any, would be on your not resisting for long. You know that she’ll treat you no better than she’s treated me, but I think you might still be sucker enough to go through with it. You have no idea how my final days have been enlivened by the thought of the trouble I shall cause when I die. It’s such a shame I can only do it once.

  It was about this time of year that Annabelle and I used to start planning our next trip to the West Indies. Autumn’s on its way. I’ve had my fun and it’s not such a bad time to be throwing in my hand. I’ve never been keen on English winters. So, whatever you do, don’t start feeling sorry for me. I’ll be thinking of you from another place – quite possibly a warmer one than Barbados.

  With fondest wishes from your old chum,

  Shagger

  ‘Friend of yours, was he?’ asked Elsie.

  For a moment I said nothing. Though in some ways I felt deeply insulted, I could at least feel rich and insulted, which was better than usual. I took the letter from Elsie and read it again.

  ‘So, that was the plan,’ I said. ‘There was something in Robert’s speech that always struck me as a bit odd – do you remember what he said about going off into the next room? It’s from a poem, “Death is Nothing at All” by Henry Scott-Holland, but the actual words are “I have only slipped away into the next room” – that’s why I didn’t recognize it at the time. Robert never was much good at quotations, and if you change a word or two of a poem . . . Anyway, I think that, from what Colin McIntosh said, Robert didn’t make a definite decision to go ahead with his plan until that evening, after Colin confirmed there really was no hope for him. The letter had already been sent to me. The clues had been planted. So, he slipped away and his game could begin. He was giving us all clues from the very beginning – even if some were a bit garbled.’

  ‘But the game went a bit wrong,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Yes, Annabelle got to the body first. I knew there was something missing when I looked round the library – it was the suicide note. The pen was there on the desk but no sign of whatever he’d been writing. Annabelle must have realized the moment she saw the body that she was about to lose the insurance money. So she pocketed the key piece of evidence while I was unbolting the door.’

  ‘But,’ said Elsie, ‘in that case, why not tell the police about the secret passage straight away? That way murder would not have been ruled out.’

  ‘I think her mind just wasn’t working that fast. Or maybe she reasoned that only she, Mrs Maggs and John O’Brian knew about the passage. It would not have looked good for John O’Brian under the circumstances.’

  ‘Or had she arranged to meet John O’Brian there that evening? Did she think he was actually waiting in the passage?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. Yesterday I would have said such a thing was too far-fetched. But yesterday was yesterday and today was today. ‘The point is that, at the time, she was reluctant to draw people’s attention to it. It was later that she came up with the idea of a mysterious stranger, who would have clumsily left multiple clues. But it was too late then to suddenly tell the police that she had remembered the passage existed. So she got me to “discover” the passage. She also got John O’Brian and Clive Brent to say that they had seen the stranger – but I’ve told you about that. Gillian Maggs might have given the game away, so she and her husband were offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Barbados until the investigations had finished. When it became clear their daughter was already revealing too much information to casual callers, she was offered the same deal, provided she left there and then.’

  ‘So, we’ve basically been following a trail of red herrings, from the library to the billiard room via the secret passage, and on out into the garden. Just like Cluedo. Except, of course, that you have to play Cluedo strictly by the rules. There’s nothing more tedious than finding somebody you ought to be able to trust has been cheating all along.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, slowly. ‘Though I’m still not sure the secret passage on the Cluedo board goes—’

  ‘It could be worse, though,’ s
aid Elsie, folding the letter away. ‘You can sell Muntham Court and buy yourself a nice flat in North London, where I can keep an eye on you . . . the painted tart will be thrown on the street . . . she’ll probably have to go and live on a proper estate with graffiti and lifts that only work every other Tuesday . . . or she might become a bag-lady and get spat on by total strangers . . . she’ll have to sit in shop doorways drinking the sort of sweet sherry she served to her guests for so many years . . . yes, it could be so much worse.’

  ‘That’s not what Robert wanted me to do, though,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘Reading between the lines he’s really asking me to take care of Annabelle . . .’

  ‘Reading between which lines? The lines on your arse? He would scarcely have gone through this whole business so that Annabelle would end up with the house and the insurance money and you.’

  ‘He says he thinks I’ll end up marrying her.’

  ‘If you aren’t careful, yes, you could.’

  ‘But I do think he wants me to keep the house.’

  ‘You mean you’ll hang onto a ruinously large house, that even a rich banker couldn’t afford to maintain, so that Annabelle isn’t made destitute?’

  ‘You could look at it as a sort of trust,’ I said. ‘The house passes to me so that I can help somebody else. And it need not be ruinous. I’d have the house, unencumbered as the lawyers say, I can sell this flat and Annabelle would have some money from the insurance so long as—’

  ‘You’re not planning to lie to the police?’

  ‘I wouldn’t need to lie exactly – we would just tell them what we found.’

  ‘And the man in a blue suit?’

  ‘He’s probably not essential. I suppose you wouldn’t like to say you saw him?’

  ‘Spot on. I wouldn’t. You can get into big trouble once you start saying things like that.’

  She said it with feeling and I wondered if she had been reading the (now abandoned) Master Thomas story. It was perfectly possible. My computer had no password protection. ‘I’m sure Annabelle and I can manage anyway,’ I said.