by L. C. Tyler
‘Your ex-wife.’
‘I can’t remember precisely.’
‘Have you seen her in the past fortnight?’
‘I’ve spent the past three weeks in France, officer. I got back yesterday evening.’
He noted this in a small book that he was carrying.
‘Châteauneuf-sur-Loire,’ I said. ‘Would you like me to spell that?’
He raised his notebook slightly so that I would not be able to see what he had written. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ he said, with a nicely judged degree of contempt for the general public that Fairfax would certainly have commended. ‘Do you know of any reason why she might have wanted to commit suicide?’
‘I can’t pretend to know for certain, but she might have had several good reasons. She has perpetual money problems: her first business went bust round about the time we split up. She went into a second venture with her sister. I think I heard that that was in trouble too. She has also just finished a relationship – quite a long-standing one.’
‘And her former partner was … ?’
‘Rupert Mackinnon. She must have been with him about ten years. I’m not sure of his current address.’
He noted these details without comment.
‘I am sorry,’ I concluded, ‘but I don’t think that I can help you much more than that.’ I stood up, preparatory to showing him out. He remained seated.
‘We had hoped that you might be able to tell us a little more, sir. You see, Mrs Tressider left what we assume was a suicide note in her car before she vanished.’
I nodded. ‘And?’
‘She left the car quite close to here – by the beach at West Wittering.’
I sat down again. ‘Bloody hell,’ I said.
‘Quite. That’s a long way to come from North London to commit suicide. I mean, it may be a coincidence, your living in West Sussex and her leaving the suicide note in West Sussex. But you will see why it struck us as odd, sir, if you know what I mean.’
It struck me as many things, though ‘odd’ was perhaps not the first word to spring to mind.
‘So, she never lived down here, did she, sir?’ he continued, as if to clarify for me an interesting fact concerning my domestic arrangements. He narrowed his eyes, leaving an ominous accusation hanging in the air that I did not like one bit.
‘No, I moved here after we split up.’
‘Then there’s the suicide note.’
He showed me a photocopy of a sheet of what had clearly been headed writing paper. The very top of the sheet had been roughly torn off, leaving a jagged edge, but a few letters of the address could be made out, including ‘N1’. There was something before and something after, but you couldn’t tell what, unless you knew the address that had been there. Which I did, of course.
‘Your wife lived in the N1 postal district of London?’ He raised an officious eyebrow.
‘Yes. Barnsbury Street, Islington.’
‘So it looks like her paper. But what we can’t work out is why she tore the top off like that. The wording’s funny, too.’
I took the note with growing trepidation and read it. It was written in lively block capitals, with playful little curls on a random selection of letters. It read as follows:
‘I mean,’ said the constable, ‘nobody writes “FAREWELL, CRUEL WORLD” on a suicide note, do they? Not in real life. You don’t even get that in detective stories, for goodness’ sake.’ He gave a contemptuous sniff.
I’ve seen (and written) worse clichés in crime fiction myself, but perhaps he read nothing but P. D. James and had higher standards than I did. ‘Sorry, officer,’ I said. ‘Having had only a few seconds to look at it, I really am not in a position to speculate on the wording. You say it was left in her car?’
‘That is correct: a red Fiat.’
I must have shown surprise because he quickly added, ‘It was a hire car, not her own. She’d collected it from Hertz at Gatwick airport a few days before it was found. She’d rented it for a week – paid for with her credit card. She must have driven it down to West Wittering the same day, left the note in it and then …’ He paused. ‘Well, of course, we don’t know what happened then. As you will be aware, you have to pay to take your car to the beach there. The gates at West Wittering beach are locked at eight thirty at this time of year. The guard noticed the Fiat on Tuesday when he was doing his final rounds. There are often a few cars still parked there, left by people who’ve gone for a walk along the coast and forgotten the time. There’s a charge for being let out after the gates have closed, but most are usually gone well before midnight. This car was still there the following evening when the guard did his rounds. It was a nice new one too – just 300 miles on the clock – not some dumped old banger, like you get all the time now round here. So he took a closer look and saw this note on the seat. Nothing else in the car, by the way – just the suicide note and the Hertz paperwork. That’s when we were called in. We discovered that your wife had not been home to Islington for a day or so, but her neighbours remembered that you had moved down here, quite close to the Witterings.’
‘I am deeply grateful,’ I said, ‘to her neighbours for pointing this out. Nevertheless, I would remind you that West Wittering is forty-five minutes’ drive at least, even if you don’t get held up going round Arundel.’
‘Bloody Arundel bypass,’ he said with a nod. Then he sucked on a tooth for a bit before adding, ‘You don’t know where she might have left her own car, do you, sir?’
‘No. Absolutely not. What sort of car does she have now anyway?’
‘It’s a Saab convertible. Metallic black with alloy wheels. Nice cars, them Saabs. Good cornering. Decent bit of acceleration. That’s missing too, you see. But it may show up. It could even be in for repairs somewhere, hence the hire car.’
He asked me a few more questions, feeling no doubt that he owed it to the Council Tax payers of West Sussex to cover the matter comprehensively; but there was little that I could usefully tell him, other than to repeat that it had been a while since I had been in touch with Geraldine and that, much though I wished I could help, I had no idea where Geraldine was or why she should have abandoned a perfectly good hire car on a Sussex beach.
‘So,’ said Elsie, when I had shut the door behind him, ‘what would Fairfax make of that, eh? A woman vanishes close to the residence of her ex-husband. She leaves a cryptic suicide note in block capitals – not in her usual handwriting – and in a car apparently hired for the purpose.’
‘Last Tuesday the ex-husband was busy not having sex in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, a long way from the place where she vanished.’
‘But why would anyone hire a car to commit suicide in?’ asked Elsie, with her agent’s eye on the bottom line. ‘Why not use your own car? It’s cheaper.’
‘You heard what he said: perhaps her own car was in for a service or something.’
‘Why get your car serviced if you’re about to kill yourself?’
It was an obvious thing to ask, and I wished I had Geraldine there to provide an answer. I had almost thought of a reply when Elsie decided to answer her own question.
‘I have three theories,’ said Elsie, prematurely ticking off the hypotheses one by one on her podgy fingers. ‘First theory, right? She did top herself, and did it in Sussex to cause you as much grief as possible. But that doesn’t explain the missing-car issue, thus I am obviously not too keen on that one. So (therefore), second theory: she did not top herself at all but is very much alive and is sitting in a pub somewhere laughing at us.’
‘Why should she do that?’
‘I don’t know, do I? Maybe she’s faked a suicide and done a runner to avoid her creditors. Or maybe she’s done it all for a giggle.’
‘All right then: she’s killed herself or she hasn’t. That’s still only two theories,’ I said.
‘I haven’t finished,’ said Elsie, with a dismissive wave of her fat little hand. ‘I’m the detective for the moment. At best, you’re just a suspect.’
‘Sorry,’ said the suspect.
‘Theory number three: perhaps somebody’s murdered her and made it look like suicide.’
‘That’s possible,’ I said with a slight but carefully judged shrug.
‘No, it isn’t – it’s just wishful thinking,’ said Elsie, sighing deeply. ‘All these little twists and turns are Geraldine to a T. Take that missing car, alloy wheels too: the whole business of switching cars would seem totally unnecessary to anyone except Geraldine. So would that note: “I’ve gone to a better place.” You bet she has. She’s done a runner. I won’t believe she’s dead until I see the body – and possibly not even then.’
‘There may never be a body,’ I said, pulling the discussion back to the suicide theory. ‘The currents off that beach are pretty strong. She could have been swept right out into the Channel.’
‘Only if she could be arsed to go into the water,’ said Elsie, staring out of the window at the buildings opposite in the fading light. ‘And at the moment, there’s nothing to suggest that’s what she did. I’d lay a pretty large bet that she is still out there somewhere, warm and dry, spending somebody else’s money.’ She seemed to be casting her glance at Peckham’s the butchers, just opposite my flat; but there was no sign of Geraldine wildly buying chops and Peckham’s Celebration Sausages with her ill-gotten gains – only Tony could be seen inside the shop, moving briskly, meticulously sweeping and washing everything down before closing.
It was a peaceful scene: a Sussex village at dusk, with the summer moving gently towards autumn. Flint-walled houses with warm mossy roofs, one more pub than was strictly necessary, a post office and an Indian take-away, all cradled within the smooth and now darkening slopes of the South Downs. For most of the inhabitants, another uneventful day was about to be followed by another peaceful night. The Worthing-bound traffic on the bypass was no more than a distant murmur. A number of birds had, quite properly, decided that it was time for their evening chorus. Everything was just as it should be. This was, after all, a place where retired people came from London to grow old and die quietly in their beds, not a place for bizarre suicides in low-mileage red Fiats.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s leave this to the police, shall we? It is fortunately their job to find my wife, dead or alive. I agree that Geraldine would be perfectly capable of faking a suicide purely for the fun of the thing. But I shall leave my wife to the police.’
‘Your ex-wife,’ said Elsie.
‘My ex-wife,’ I said.
Three
In the beginning writing was pure pleasure. It was Elsie who taught me that, with only a little effort, it could just as easily be mindless drudgery.
It was Elsie too who taught me that the royalties on a 300-page book are generally greater than those on a 200-page book, even if the story could be told better in 200 pages. (‘Add fifty per cent more suspects,’ she advised.) It was Elsie who insisted on a new Fairfax book every year, with a publication date to coincide with the purchase of Christmas presents. (She had a theory that people bought my books to give to others rather than to read themselves.) It was Elsie who helpfully suggested that plots could be endlessly recycled because my readers had the attention span of a gnat with Alzheimer’s. (For once I ignored her.)
My first Fairfax book, All on a Summer’s Day, was written when I was very young indeed – not yet twenty-five – and while I was still working for the Inland Revenue as the most junior of trainee tax inspectors. Writing was then – how can I express this? – a shiny box, brimming with an inexhaustible supply of chocolate of every possible type, whose textures and flavours I could still only guess at. I relished every word, trying for some perfection that I knew must be possible and, I think, almost achieved in that first novel. The plot must have come to me in a single flash, because I don’t remember having to alter it significantly as the book progressed.
Fairfax, drinking heavily and barely tolerated by his colleagues, is on the verge of early retirement. A murder inquiry is being closed without an arrest or any real progress. Fairfax, as the least useful member of the team, has been left to tidy up the paperwork while others move on to more promising cases. There is no pressure to finish the task quickly – indeed, Fairfax’s colleagues are praying that it will keep him out of their way until his farewell party. In a strange way, it suits Fairfax too – never a team player at the best of times and increasingly comfortable with his solitary drinking bouts and lonely task. In his more sober moments, however, Fairfax works his way methodically, the stub of a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, through the evidence that has been collected.
My story opens on 6 July – the anniversary of the date of the crime, and a stiflingly hot day. Fairfax’s brain has not been called upon to work at full stretch for some time, but there is something about the case that has troubled him almost since the start: a feeling that they have overlooked the obvious. While glancing at his till receipt during a refreshing liquid lunch at the White Hart, it suddenly strikes Fairfax that 6/7 on a receipt might mean 6 July or 7 June, depending on whether you write the day or month first. This is perhaps more obvious now than it was then, when only Americans wrote dates backwards. He leaves his third pint almost untouched and returns to his desk. Sure enough, one key assumption ultimately rests on a single small piece of evidence – a receipt – that gives the date not as 6 July but as 6/7 . With trembling nicotine-stained fingers, Fairfax goes back through the statements again, this time discounting this piece of evidence. It is like a crossword puzzle in which an early answer has been incorrectly entered, making a nonsense of later clues.
Now that this small false step has been corrected, other seemingly unimportant fragments slip into place. Sitting at his desk, Fairfax reruns the whole inquiry, using the evidence that they had all along, but from this new starting point. By the end of the afternoon he has solved in a day what the team failed to achieve in a year. I concluded the story not with the arrest of the suspect nor even with the chief constable congratulating Fairfax, but with Fairfax happily surrounded by disorganized heaps of paper, waiting for the inspector to come in and ask him whether everything has been filed yet.
The book ran to less than 150 pages and, because the action takes place in a single day, has a particularly satisfying structure. Apart from the brief visit to the pub and back, the action does not shift from the room in the police station. I enjoyed playing with recurring metaphors such as an unfinished crossword puzzle on Fairfax’s desk, and dropping early clues about the ambiguous nature of dates through the medium of Fairfax’s own historical studies. It was the only Fairfax book that I can say I really enjoyed writing and it is perhaps ironic that it is the only one that is now out of print, being (in the view of my publisher) incompatible with the later fast-moving plots and scrupulous attention to the detail of modern police investigations. By the time I wrote the second Fairfax book I had Elsie as my agent and was taking a harder and more commercial approach to literature. Today I look at that box of chocolates and it seems to be empty except for a couple of unwanted coffee creams that are all that now remains of the very bottom layer.
I think that Fairfax both sensed and resented the change in my attitude and he became, if anything, more introverted and secretive. He stepped back, it has to be admitted, from open alcoholic excess, but I could tell that he was still drinking quite heavily on the quiet. Most writers will tell you of the strange phenomenon by which the characters they create take on a life of their own. Fairfax, like Elsie, often seemed to disregard my opinions completely.
It was in the second book, A Most Civilized Murder, that I decided to give Fairfax an interest in church architecture. I knew before I did so that he would have strong views, but I had no idea how quirky they would prove to be. I quickly found that he had no time for Perpendicular, the very glory and summit of English high Gothic, referring to it disparagingly as ‘spiky’. He also despised Decorated and Early English. The only true church architecture for Fairfax was solid, g
loomy, cavernous Norman. Even Transitional, with its tentative move away from the semicircle and towards the pointed arch, he viewed as effete, decadent and suspect. As for Wren, that dickhead had completely lost the plot: St Paul’s was a mere pagan temple, unworthy of the name of a Christian church.
Having discovered Fairfax’s preferences, I immediately gave Buckford a pristine and unaltered Norman cathedral, which he thereafter visited frequently, though with no especial show of gratitude. When, at a much later stage, I started to have to draw maps of Buckford, I realized that in All on a Summer’s Day Fairfax must have walked past the cathedral twice without a glance or a single comment. But, as I have said, the book is now out of print, and nobody is ever likely to spot that strange anomaly.
How Fairfax manages to reconcile his idiosyncratic but nevertheless very genuine Christian piety with his secret drinking bouts and unfathomable pessimism is something that he keeps locked deep inside his policeman’s soul, and has never revealed to me.
I had scarcely shown Elsie out of the flat, when the bell rang yet again.
I must explain that Findon, where I now live, though large for a Sussex village, is en route to nowhere except Worthing. Friends from London did not habitually drop in on their way to and from other places. Elsie occasionally forsook her office, as she had that afternoon, to visit me rather than vice versa, but more usually I made the journey up to Hampstead to see her. Friends from Findon, such as I had, rarely called unannounced. Days, often weeks, passed without anyone ringing the bell of my small flat in Greypoint House. My immediate reaction was therefore that Elsie had left something behind or that the police had returned with additional questions. Nothing had quite prepared me for who it would be.
‘Rupert?’ I asked, because I was for a moment genuinely uncertain.
Middle age is cruel to the truly beautiful. I am neither more nor less remarkable now than I was when I was twenty. But for the jeunesse dorée, middle age can prove a dramatic fall from grace.
