Herring in the Smoke

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Biscuit?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Definitely not,’ I said, taking a sip of coffee.

  ‘Good of you to call round,’ said Joe. ‘But I thought it wouldn’t be too much out of your way, us being so close to the railway station.’

  ‘How did you know I’d been to London?’ I asked.

  ‘We phoned Mr Ogilvie to arrange to see him. He said he’d been lunching with you at his club. Nice place?’

  ‘It was OK. I’m not planning to apply for membership. So whatever it is that you want to tell me is about Ogilvie? He gave me this to give to you, by the way.’ I passed him Ogilvie’s registration.

  ‘Yes, he told us that too. I fear the Greeks, Ethelred, even when they bring gifts. If he’s happy for us to have this, then it is almost certainly valueless.’

  ‘You think he wasn’t in Chichester?’

  ‘Or he was in Chichester but in another car entirely. That’s the problem with police work. It makes you a bit cynical about generous offers of help. But it wasn’t Ogilvie that I wanted to talk about. There are three things. The first is this … You remember you told me about a previous boyfriend – Roy Johnston?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, my trip to Australia’s off. Coincidentally he arrived in England last month. We checked immigration records. We haven’t been able to find out where he’s staying yet, but we were able to get information from his credit card company and his bank. There were a number of transactions in London – mainly around Oxford Street but one or two in Islington. So we reckon that he’s based somewhere in the centre of town, but that he pops over to Islington from time to time. What do you make of that?’

  ‘You think he’s been checking on Roger Vane’s movements?’

  ‘That would seem likely. The transactions stop about four or five days ago. So maybe he’s gone. Or is using some other card we haven’t traced yet. No sign of him having paid a hotel bill, though. Of course, he could have paid it in cash, especially if he suspected we were on to him and might be checking card and phone records. But he may be staying with a friend. Any idea who might still be in touch with him?’

  I shook my head. ‘So you’re looking for Johnston?’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t have a recent photograph of him. We’ve managed to get a copy of his passport photo – about nine years old. We’ve also come up with one or two on the Internet …’ He passed me some blurred images. ‘These would be twenty-four, maybe twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘They’re from the Gascoyne programmes,’ I said. ‘First series. The company that made the programmes might be able to let you have something that was slightly more high definition. But they’d still be pretty old. He was only ever—’

  ‘… in the first series. Yes, we’ve got that. Anyway, our lack of a recent snapshot makes it a bit trickier trying to spot him on CCTV.’ Joe turned the screen on his desk so that it was facing me. ‘Here’s footage from a camera quite close to the alleyway, facing west – there are no cameras in the alleyway itself and you can’t quite see the entrance to the alleyway, but it’s just behind us, as it were, from this viewpoint.’

  He tapped his keyboard and the frozen view of Chichester’s main shopping street started to move, cold and ghostly under the street lights. The windows of the closed shops still glowed, showing mannequins dressed in the latest fashions, stacks of chocolate bars, jumbles of DIY equipment. We watched various people pass by. Then Roger Vane came into view, striding towards us. He paused for a moment as if uncertain which way to go, looked around and then, as if having made a decision, confidently pressed on towards his death. Joe stopped the film.

  ‘So, that’s 11.32. He’s coming from the direction of his hotel. You can see that he is about to turn right into the alleyway.’

  Joe restarted the CCTV footage. A man walked his dog very slowly along the street. Shortly after, a man in a leather jacket glanced up at the camera and hurried on. A group of girls, on a night out, appeared, coming from the direction of the alleyway, one slightly behind the others. They lingered for a moment while one of the main group was sick on the pavement, then they passed unsteadily down the street. The girl who was on her own – maybe she’d had a row with the rest – also went on her way, a little behind the rest, her back turned to us. The man with the dog returned.

  ‘That should now be shortly after the time of the murder, we think. The alleyway cuts through to another street. It’s less well frequented than East Street. Here’s the view from our camera there – this time facing east.’

  A man and a woman walked down the road hand in hand. A couple of young men ran after them and overtook them. The couple seemed not to notice their intrusion. They paused, kissed, and drifted on. The street was empty for a while. Then the man in the leather jacket hurried past. Then a bit later the girls whom we had seen in the previous recording came into view, but as a single group. Joe stopped the recording.

  ‘Both the girls and this guy obviously went through the alleyway at about the right time – the man first, then the girls maybe four or five minutes later. They’re all picked up by both cameras. Do you recognise the man? Could it be Johnston?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s difficult to say, but he looks much too young. Too tall as well, I think. Johnston and Vane were of a similar build, apparently. On the footage there, the man in the leather jacket looks a lot taller than Vane.’

  ‘Well, we thought he looked a bit young to be Johnston. Could it be any of the others you’ve spoken to? Ogilvie? Davies? Slide? Macdonald?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The picture’s not good, but he’s really too young for any of them. Too tall for Slide as well – much too tall. Slide’s five six, maybe five seven. Possibly about right for Ogilvie or Davies. I can’t see Davies in a leather jacket and jeans, though. Or Ogilvie.’

  Joe started the recording again. The street was empty for some time, then a woman and dog appeared. Joe pointed to the screen.

  ‘That’s the woman who discovered the body,’ he said. ‘So Vane’s already been killed by this point. His body was in a sort of dead end, a side passage leading off the main alleyway, so it might have been there half an hour or so – the man in the jacket and the girls could have walked straight past it in the dark. Of course, neither camera covers the actual entrance to or the exit from the alley – just our luck, eh?’

  ‘So, somebody could have got in and out undetected?’

  ‘By these cameras, yes – if the killer knew which way to enter and leave. But there are plenty of others in the centre of town. If we’re ruling out the people we’ve seen so far, then it’s a matter of going through lots and lots of CCTV in central Chichester. Routine stuff. We’ll try to track down the man and the girls, anyway – they may have seen the killer. It’s a shame about Leather Jacket; we thought we might be onto something.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before,’ I said.

  Joe made a brief pencilled note.

  ‘Still,’ I said, ‘that’s progress. We know Johnston is in the country and seems to have been stalking Vane. Maybe he’ll show up on another camera, as you say. But it looks as if whoever killed Roger Vane knew the centre of Chichester well and knew where the cameras are.’

  We turned back to the screen, where the occasional figure still flitted along the now eerily empty street. Somewhere, out of sight, Vane was dead and the police would already be inspecting the body.

  ‘There was one other thing that we wondered if you could help us with,’ said Joe. ‘We have a report from the pathologist. He made a very odd discovery.’

  ‘I’ll help if I can,’ I said.

  ‘Vane appeared to have an old scar on his shoulder.’

  ‘He did have one. I saw it.’

  ‘Except he didn’t. He only appeared to have one. It was theatrical make-up – five quid’s worth of rubber. Very realistic for a Halloween party or a television programme. But not good enough to fool a pathologist, it would seem.’

  ‘Why would he have done that?’ I asked.<
br />
  ‘That’s what we wondered too. Any ideas?’

  ‘Was the scar on his face faked too?’ I asked. That had been what convinced Elsie that Vane was who he said he was. The scar that matched the photo on the wall.

  Joe frowned and looked at the report again. ‘Yes, it’s mentioned briefly. Scar close to mouth. Is that the one?’

  ‘He doesn’t say that’s also a prosthesis?’

  ‘No. That must be real. Having spotted the one fake, I imagine he’d have been on the lookout for another. He just mentions the scar in passing. The real Vane had a scar there, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just for a moment I wondered if we’d all got it wrong …’

  ‘So did we. Fake scar, fake writer … But the real Vane had a scar by his mouth? Ah well. That’s one theory we can cross off. But why would he fake the other scar? Especially if, as you say, he had a genuine one that proved who he was? What was this other scar supposed to be?’

  ‘It was supposed to be the wound inflicted by Tim Macdonald when he’d hit Vane in Thailand years ago …’

  ‘So Macdonald had hit Vane when they had their argument and Vane wanted to show that it had been worse than Macdonald had thought?’ said Joe. ‘What was the point of that? OK, so he scores off Macdonald in some way, but would he really have been that petty? After all that time?’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ I said. ‘So you’re saying the actual scar, underneath all the rubber, was insignificant?’

  ‘The actual scar under the rubber was completely non-existent.’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘I had a case once,’ said Joe, ‘where the wife destroyed her husband’s collection of vintage jazz records, having cancelled the insurance on them a couple of days before. She melted them using the kitchen blowtorch that he’d bought her for her birthday. She’d been hoping for diamond earrings, apparently. It’s interesting what ideas people come up with once they set their mind to it.’

  ‘True,’ I said.

  ‘In summary, then,’ said Joe, ‘the prime suspect has to be Roy Johnston. He hated Vane’s guts and, by the most amazing coincidence, arrived back in England just before Vane was murdered. Motive and opportunity. Since his return he’s done everything in his power to remain hidden. We’ve no evidence he ever travelled to Chichester and don’t know what he looks like now well enough to pick him up on CCTV – or not so far. But I can’t help feeling he has something to do with this. Well, at least we’ve cleared that up. Do you fancy another coffee before you go?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘So, did you murder him?’ asked Lucinda. ‘I wouldn’t blame you, of course, but we’ve already had to revise the jacket blurb three times. First we talked about Vane as having mysteriously disappeared. Then we had to talk about him as having unexpectedly reappeared. Now we’re changing it again referring to him as the late and much-loved Roger Norton Vane. I don’t want to have to come up with new wording to allow for your conviction as his killer. So, if you did it, please let me know now so I can finalise the cover design.’

  ‘I was having dinner with friends,’ I said. ‘Somebody else killed him. I have no idea who.’

  ‘No chance of finding out who did it before we go to print, I suppose?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask the police,’ I said.

  ‘But they are at least aware of your deadlines?’

  ‘Totally,’ I said.

  ‘All right – just make sure they know that we can’t make any major changes after copy-editing. I’d like an arrest by then or not at all.’

  ‘Just out of interest, where were you when Vane was killed?’ I asked.

  ‘Watching another rerun of Gascoyne,’ she said. ‘It’s what I do when I can’t sleep. It was the episode where the victim drowns in a vat of whisky and isn’t found for a year. They get him out perfectly preserved and with a smile on his face.’

  ‘Which book was that?’ I asked.

  ‘None of them. It was an original script. Vane’s own plots were a bit more subtle – at least when I was editing the books.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘Yes, it turns out that the foreman saw the victim entering the still room, followed by his disinherited half-brother. You don’t suspect the half-brother because you don’t know he’s been disinherited at that point.’

  ‘No, I mean witnesses to your being at home.’

  ‘My husband and children,’ said Lucinda. ‘Good enough?’

  ‘The police say it’s all about opportunity,’ I said.

  ‘Which is why Vane survived this long,’ said Lucinda. ‘Laos is a long way to go and none of us knew he was there. Whereas Chichester would be much easier – plenty of cheap off-peak tickets. And a lot of people seem to live round there, anyway. If you do decide you killed him, Ethelred, could you let me know by tomorrow lunchtime, at the very latest?’

  ‘You’re almost becoming a Londoner,’ said Elsie, depositing a small cappuccino on the table in front of me.

  ‘Been there, done that,’ I said. ‘I used to be a Londoner, remember? Before my ex-wife took my flat and most of my money. I’m quite happy in Sussex. No plans to return to the Smoke.’

  ‘Well, you’re in London more than Sussex at the moment.’

  ‘I needed to talk to Lucinda,’ I said. ‘There’s the question of how we handle the biography now that Roger Vane is undoubtedly dead. Do we wait for the inquest and maybe even the murder trial? Or do we publish now?’

  ‘And?’ asked Elsie.

  ‘Lucinda thought we should rush out an edition now – produce a revised version once the murderer is sentenced. She’s happy I write it in prison if the murderer turns out to be me.’

  ‘Two separate editions? We’ll need a variation of contract,’ said Elsie. ‘I’ll contact her. I hope you didn’t say you’d do the revised version for nothing?’

  ‘We didn’t talk about money,’ I said. ‘Just my possible incarceration.’

  ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘Don’t confess to the murder, though, without running it past me. It ought to increase the advance by two or three thousand.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ said Elsie. ‘Well, if you claim you didn’t, then I believe you. I’m just saying there’s a couple of grand in it for you if you did.’

  ‘I’d also hoped to talk to Cynthia,’ I said, ‘but I can’t get hold of her. I assume she’s quite upset at her uncle’s death … in spite of being cut out of the will. Actually, her uncle’s death means she’ll never get to see any of it.’

  ‘I can’t get her either,’ said Elsie. ‘She’s not picking up or returning calls. I phoned her mother too, but she said she hadn’t seen her – not worried or anything, just she hadn’t been in touch. As for Cynthia being upset, I’m not sure she ever did accept that the murdered man was her uncle, in spite of all the evidence that he was. She held out to the bitter end, bless her.’

  ‘You don’t think that she could have been right?’ I asked. ‘That prosthetic scar was odd …’

  ‘Well, you were the one who was always convinced it was him.’

  ‘I’m just saying I don’t understand it.’

  ‘I hope you’re not planning to tell me all the things you don’t understand – I’m a busy woman.’

  ‘It’s just that one thing,’ I said.

  ‘Is it? Really? Are you sure? Nothing else puzzling your little brain? OK – I agree it is odd – but what was it supposed to prove? It was a weird thing for either a real or fake Vane to have done. It was the other scar – the one that he had before he vanished and that I so cleverly spotted – that proved who he was. He never needed to fake the shoulder injury. Not even Tim knew whether he’d really hurt Roger when he swung that walking stick at him. Clearly he hadn’t hurt him at all, but Tim didn’t know that. So why waste a fiver on joke-shop rubber?’

  ‘Was it to make Tim feel guilty?’ I asked. ‘Joe thought it might be.’

  ‘Always possible, because that’s what
people do. But to what end? They’d split up. Roger had thrown Tim out. It was all so over. So why does it matter if Tim feels a bit guilty? And he showed the scar to you, not to Tim.’

  ‘So, the shoulder scar is irrelevant?’ I asked.

  ‘Far from it. I don’t know if you ever read detective novels, Ethelred, so stop me if you’ve heard this before … but when something weird happens like somebody faking a shoulder wound, there’s usually a reason for it. It’s not something people do on impulse, like getting a tattoo with their girlfriend’s name misspelt on it. So, whenever he did it, he probably thought he had a good reason for doing it at the time – like the tattoo, actually. If we knew what the reason was …’

  ‘Well, we won’t, because he’s dead,’ I pointed out. ‘He didn’t tell you or me or even Cynthia. In a way it’s quite comforting to know that we can all take some of our weirder secrets to the grave.’

  Elsie nodded. Perhaps she had a few weird secrets of her own. ‘Anyway, Roger proved he was who he said he was in many other ways – also due to my cleverness in devising the questions – he knew all about that Christmas incident, for example. Only he and Cynthia – and Cynthia’s mother, of course – could possibly have known about the box and stuff. I’m surprised that Cynthia still had doubts after that, but it convinced me.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘You’re right. Whatever doubts we had before, it is Vane who was killed in the alleyway – probably because he’d finally convinced somebody else that he was the genuine article. The police think Roy Johnston is the most likely suspect. He had a long-term grudge against Vane for destroying his career. It would be an amazing coincidence that Johnston just happened to be in England when Vane was killed. So, let’s say Johnston phoned him and arranged to meet him in the alleyway. God knows what excuse he gave for that being the meeting place, but Johnston killed him and made his getaway – all without appearing on CCTV, unless Johnston is a master of disguise. It’s the perfect crime, except he has to leave the country at some point. He’ll be stopped at the airport. Or, if he stays, he’ll need to use a credit card and the police will at least know in which part of the country he’s hiding out.’