by L. C. Tyler
‘You don’t have any cats yourself?’
‘I might have to get one or two. We’ll see how it goes. I’m a crap tea-maker by the way. Why don’t we switch to red wine. I’ve got a bottle open. And if I haven’t, I’ve got a corkscrew.’
I realised that her appearance was not so much of somebody who has just got up as somebody who has been drinking steadily and carefully since shortly before breakfast.
‘Coffee might be better for both of us,’ I said. ‘Shall I get us some?’
Emma laughed. ‘That’s exactly what you said to me at Harrogate,’ she said.
‘When?’
‘In the bar of the Old Swan, when I tried to pick you up.’
‘You tried to pick me up?’
‘You didn’t realise I was asking you to come to bed with me? Good grief! There was me thinking how gentlemanly you’d been about the whole thing, chatting away in the bar and resisting the temptation to accept my offer – whereas in practice I’d just been too drunk to make it clear I was an easy lay.’
‘But Crispin was there in the bar …’
‘I was scarcely expecting to see him back in his own bed when there were other beds to go to. I doubt he even noticed us ensconced there in the corner, or registered you seeing me back to my room.’
‘So I did. I’d forgotten that. Just a peck on the cheek, then, after I made sure you’d got the right bedroom?’
‘You got me a nice cup of coffee. Then we chatted for a bit in a quiet corner of Reception – all very cosy and promising, as I thought. Then you saw me back to my room. I believe we shook hands in the corridor. Or maybe I’m making that bit up. I can’t recall. Perhaps it’s as well I can’t. It clearly wasn’t my finest performance as a seductress.’
‘I remember it as a very pleasant evening.’
Emma burst out laughing. ‘Very pleasant? If you say so. Just out of interest, would you have slept with me, if I’d communicated better?’
That seemed a question fraught with all sorts of dangers.
‘Do you think Crispin did notice us? Did he think maybe that we did sleep together?’
‘It wouldn’t have bothered him.’
‘You don’t think he might have resented it?’
‘Not a chance.’
I pondered this for a bit.
‘Did he ever mention me at all? I mean, in any context?’
Emma frowned. ‘Ethelred, you spurned my advances but you seem very concerned about whether you were constantly in my husband’s thoughts. I’m not quite sure what to make of this but I have to warn you that Crispin is as heterosexual as it is possible to be. And you’re about thirty years too old for him anyway.’
‘Oh sorry … I didn’t mean …’
She raised an eyebrow. It was time to change the subject.
‘Do you know a writer called Henry Holiday?’ I asked.
Emma turned and looked across the room at the unwashed dishes. For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard my question, then I saw she was frowning, as if trying to recall something. ‘Sort of … I mean, I’ve spoken to him … He’s a drinking buddy of Crispin’s in a minor way. I don’t think they’re great friends, exactly, but they tend to occupy the same bit of the bar at conferences and confide in each other, the way you do at three o’clock in the morning.’
‘And they saw each other down here in Sussex? Henry lives close to where I do in West Wittering.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think they met up much other than at Bristol and Harrogate or Crime in the Court. But, as you will gather, I didn’t always know exactly where Crispin was.’
‘No. I suppose not. You implied that Crispin was … well … into underage girls. Is that really true?’
‘That was probably the booze talking. The booze has a very low opinion of my husband. Crispin’s other women have all tended to be on the young side, but even I wouldn’t want to accuse him of being a paedo. Crispin’s general technique, you see, was to offer whichever silly girl it was some sound middle-aged advice and assistance with their careers, while nudging her gently towards his bed – or any other reasonably flat surface. You don’t get many teenage writers, so most of them tended to be in their twenties or early thirties, often from one of the creative writing courses he taught on. Anyway, I may be drunk, but I have noticed you’re asking a lot of questions for somebody who is supposed to be dropping off a couple of books.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s none of my business. I’m probably just being tedious.’
‘On the contrary,’ she said. ‘It’s good to have somebody to talk to in an open and grown-up manner. Until I can buy a couple of cats, it’s great to have human company of any sort, even another crime writer. Why don’t you stay for dinner? You can help me finish up some of this wine. Crispin left quite a stash of it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to get back.’
I paused, wondering why I had said that. I had nothing to go back to. Not even a cat. Maybe there were some good wildlife programmes on television. But it seemed right. Under the circumstances.
‘Let me know if you hear from Crispin,’ I said.
‘OK. And I’ll pass on …’ She checked the covers. ‘Murderous Sussex and The Book of the Gun.’
I slightly regretted the loss of the latter book – an illustrated history of firearms up to 1900 – but they gave me an excuse to go back if I needed one.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘My pleasure,’ she said. ‘I suppose I can always spend the evening washing up.’
She didn’t show me out.
It was a miserable journey home. Sometimes the rain was so heavy I could scarcely see where I was going. Every now and then, I glanced in the rear-view mirror. Occasionally a car would follow me for a few miles at a distance of twenty yards or so. Sometimes I would deliberately slow down and the car would then swish past in a cloud of spray. Sometimes I would speed up, leaving the following vehicle way behind. Not once did anyone show any sign of responding to my change of pace. I was as certain as I could be that nobody had either followed me to Brighton or tailed me on the way back. Whoever was planning to kill me was frankly doing a shit job.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Where are you now?’ asked Elsie.
‘Back in West Wittering,’ I said. I’d been explaining over the phone what I’d found out at the Vynall residence. Elsie was no more impressed than she needed to be.
‘Why didn’t you stay for dinner?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘If she was drinking as heavily as you say, then she’d have let slip a few things as the evening went on.’
‘I don’t think that would have been very fair.’
‘What’s fair got to do with anything?’
‘It’s just that I didn’t drive all the way to Brighton in order to behave in an underhand manner.’
‘Actually – and this point has only just occurred to me – why did you go over to Brighton? You could have talked to her on the phone and saved yourself two hours’ driving along the A27.’
‘I just thought it would be better to talk to Emma face to face.’
There was a long pause as the person with whom I was not talking face to face did some thinking.
‘You do actually fancy her, don’t you?’
‘Elsie, we are not in the playground and I’m not thirteen years old. Random assertions that I fancy somebody are juvenile.’
‘True. Bet you do, though. And you knew Crispin wouldn’t be there. Nice work, Tressider, other than your screwing it all up at the end by not staying for dinner. Actually, she’s exactly your type – blonde, quite tall, a bit bossy – probably head girl at her school.’
‘Is that right?’ I’m not as good at sarcasm as Elsie is, but I try from time to time. On this occasion, though, what I intended as a put-down came out as a simple question.
‘You know it’s right. Think back to all your previous wives and girlfriends. Were they or were they not blonde? Did they or di
d they not call the shots? Who did they have more respect for – you or the fluff under the sofa? Are you sure you didn’t sleep with her in Harrogate?’
‘I’d scarcely forget that I’d slept with her.’
‘How sweet and old-fashioned of you. You’d have probably written her a thank you note the morning after. Well, that would explain Crispin’s antipathy towards you if he thought you had been shagging his missus. That would be worth a few one-star reviews.’
‘But I hadn’t. And Emma says it would have made no difference. So there must be some other reason why Crispin wrote the reviews.’
‘Just because Emma says it, it doesn’t make it true. Any of it.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘what’s really interesting is that Crispin had moved out well before New Year. On New Year’s Eve he went to the Old House at Home from the residence of his teenage mistress and then, quite possibly, returned to it afterwards.’
‘Or, if he didn’t return, his teenage mistress doesn’t seem to have noticed yet. Possibly she’s focussing on her GCSE retakes.’
‘He still hasn’t been reported missing,’ I said.
‘Precisely. When Agatha Christie vanished, back in the twenties, the hunt was on within hours. Nobody has seen fit to report him lost.’
‘Which suggests that he isn’t lost, but is alive and well – with whichever woman he went to.’
‘Or that crime writers are worth less than they used to be.’
‘That too,’ I said.
‘And Emma Vynall gave you no name?’
‘No.’
‘That’s odd too. I mean, a woman chucks a man out of the house – it’s usually for something specific – she’s discovered her best friend’s knickers in the glove compartment of the family car, for example. She may be misguided. She may be wrong. She may have had one bottle of red wine too many. These things happen to all of us. But she will have a reason. She will have got a name out of her husband if nothing else, because that’s something women can do.’
‘I think she said Crispin had left her. She didn’t tell him to go.’
‘Even then, wouldn’t he say, I’m leaving you for so-and-so? Or, if not, wouldn’t she ask? There’s a strange lack of curiosity on her part. He leaves. She gets permanently drunk and considers buying a cat. But she never tries to find out who he’s left her for.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that, on all of the generally accepted scales of weirdness, this scores seven and a half to eight.’
‘Is that high?’
‘It’s out of ten. It means it’s difficult to credit. Your not having had sex for two years scores one and a quarter.’
‘That’s helpful,’ I said.
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘She did give me one name,’ I said. ‘Mary Devlin Jones.’
In the silence that followed, I wondered if I had been wise to mention this at all. It was a long time ago and had no relevance.
‘She used to be with Atkins and Portas?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But they dropped her. I remember that.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘There were rumours floating around that her first book was plagiarised. It did her a lot of damage. Atkins and Portas weren’t happy, since it would have been a clear breach of contract. It also caused problems with her agent.’
‘It wasn’t plagiarised, exactly,’ I said. I retold the story as I had heard it from Emma.
‘Sounds like plagiarism to me,’ said Elsie. ‘She didn’t write it herself.’
‘Emma may not have got it quite right.’
‘You have other inside information that contradicts Emma’s version?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
‘Are you sure? There’s this strange note in your voice that happens only when you are lying.’
I said nothing.
‘So you are basically bullshitting, then.’
‘I thought I’d made a lying noise, not a bullshitting noise.’
‘They are very similar,’ said Elsie. ‘So, what will you do next?’
‘I need to see Henry to report back. It is, after all, Henry’s lost weekend that I’m supposed to be investigating, rather than Crispin’s current whereabouts.’
‘Unless Henry killed Crispin.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think he did.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, the lack of any possible motive, for one thing. And if he had killed him, I honestly don’t believe that he would forget about it. And if he remembers killing him, why get me to investigate?’
‘But he was the last person to see Crispin alive,’ said Elsie.
‘Crispin’s not dead.’
On the other hand, there was the photograph. I wouldn’t tell Elsie at the moment. She was apt to jump to false conclusions, and even I had no idea what to make of it yet. Perhaps I should ask Henry. I needed to do some shopping – the supermarket in East Wittering would still be open. I could call in on him on my way back.
‘It’s not one you’d want to use as your author photo on the inside of the book jacket,’ I said.
Henry squinted at the picture and held it out at arm’s length. ‘I agree that it’s not exactly flattering, but I’m clearly not trying to avoid having my picture taken. The flash made me jump – that’s all. You can’t read much into it. Still, it does show that I was at that pub on New Year’s Eve. Thank you.’
‘But you don’t remember the picture being taken?’
‘Not really. Was that the only shot I was in?’
‘There was just the one photo of you, which you now have, and none of Crispin. I guess that shows he had already moved on elsewhere.’
‘And the landlord didn’t notice you had taken this away?’
‘He may see that it’s gone and put two and two together – the pub wasn’t exactly crowded. But I doubt he’ll call the police to investigate. He can presumably print another one off. And it will be sometime before I’m in Didling Green again, if ever. I’d hesitate to say I’d committed the perfect crime, but it’s pretty close.’
‘And you also went up the hill?’ asked Henry.
‘Yes. There was a track leading up onto the Downs, more or less as you described it. But, in the end, there’s not much up there, to tell you the truth – just a muddy track and a wood and then a footpath over the Downs. There are plenty of brambles around – if you’d tripped, say, you’d have ended up with all sorts of scratches. So that fits too. Could you have just taken a wrong turning after you left the pub, got out for some reason?’
I paused. It sounded unlikely. If you drove up there on a rainy night, thinking perhaps that the track led somewhere, wouldn’t you just turn round and go back down once you saw it was a dead end? Or might you need to get out and see if you had enough space to turn in, scratching yourself on some brambles in the dark?
‘I’m not absolutely sure I went up there at all,’ said Henry.
‘Not many people do – at least at this time of year. I met a woman walking her dog. She seemed to think it was pretty odd I was up there on my own.’
‘She said that to you?’
‘More or less, though the dog took most of the flak.’
Henry looked again at the photo, then stuffed it casually into his pocket. If I’d been hoping for praise I might have to wait a little longer. Some things clearly didn’t change.
‘Then I went over to Brighton to talk to Crispin’s wife,’ I said.
‘Good grief! What did you do that for? I thought you’d already phoned and got as much information as you could?’
‘I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t telling me where Crispin was. I needed to check where Crispin had been that evening.’
‘And you told her that I thought I might have killed her husband?’
‘Of course not. I scarcely mentioned your name.’
‘Scarcely? So, you did mention it?’
‘Only in passing. If it helps, sh
e said that she thought you and Crispin only ever met at conferences. She doesn’t know you and he were out on New Year’s Eve. She actually thought that the two of you didn’t get on that well, though she did say she thought you both confided in each other.’
Henry’s expression showed that he would rather I hadn’t mentioned his name at all.
‘You know that Crispin and his wife have split up?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I’m assuming he confided that much?’
‘I’d heard something,’ he said.
‘He didn’t talk about it on New Year’s Eve?’
‘No. Why should he? I knew already.’
‘He didn’t say who he was staying with?’
‘Not a word.’
‘Really? That’s odd. He didn’t let slip a name or anything?’
‘Ethelred, on my honour, not once that evening did he mention where he was staying. And I didn’t feel it necessary to ask. Do you want me to swear an oath on the Bible?’
I conceded that that might be excessive. ‘You met him at the Old House at Home … did he leave his car there, by the way?’
‘No. We drove to Chichester in my car because he hadn’t got his. I think he said it was in Brighton.’
‘Then he probably walked to the pub. If so, there’s a good chance he was staying close by.’
‘I suppose he could have been. This may or may not be relevant, Ethelred, but a bus stops right outside the pub and there would have been plenty of taxis.’
This was true. I should have thought of it myself. I drive past the pub often enough. Buses pass every half-hour or so in each direction. They run until almost midnight.
‘It’s just odd the way he has vanished without trace,’ I said. ‘It’s also odd nobody at all has reported him missing. Wherever he was staying, somebody should have alerted the police if he’d failed to show up after going out for a quick drink on New Year’s Eve.’
