by L. C. Tyler
‘But readers of crime novels expect a suitably convoluted motive, a carefully planned and executed crime. That’s where you all went wrong.’
‘Is that it?’ asked Ethelred. ‘Is that what you wanted to say about murder in general?’
‘There’s a lot more if you’d like it,’ said Joe.
‘We get the picture,’ said Margery. ‘Now tell us who the hell Wayne Flood is.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Elsie
‘I understand your puzzlement,’ said Joe, ‘but the problem is that you have all been behaving like characters in a crime novel. You’ve allowed yourselves to be seduced by the ingenious rather than the probable. You’ve wanted to believe, for example, that because Roger Vane purportedly lost his virginity in an alleyway near here, somebody who knew him well would wish to lure him back to the same place and kill him there. Why on earth would they do that, other than to draw attention to their connection with him? And because the idea of revenge long deferred is so attractive, you were willing to believe that Dr Slide might be capable of ambushing and coshing Roy Johnston, believing him to be Roger Vane. But is that really likely? Dr Slide walks slowly, with a stick. You know that. Isn’t it more likely that it was somebody younger and stronger? You, Ethelred, liked the idea that Roger Vane might have vanished because of some conspiracy involving MI6 – you invoked the interesting case of Jim Thompson. But again, how often do you think that happens? There was no conclusive proof that Vane had ever had any contact with MI6. Dr Slide said that he was most unsuitable – garrulous, petulant. Are these the qualities of an MI6 officer? Of course not and you know it. But you chose nevertheless to ignore this very accurate assessment and to believe that Dr Slide might have recruited him.
‘And there was plenty of other much more mundane evidence that you also chose to ignore. I said right at the beginning that the most likely thing was that Vane – or rather Johnston – went for a stroll and was attacked by some druggie who needed twenty quid for his next fix. If we could have found evidence that any of your suspects had been near the alleyway at the right time it would have been a different matter. But we watched the CCTV and none of them appeared. It is true that I said there was a way you could get in and out of the alleyway without being caught on film, but I also said that you would be picked up by one of the other cameras nearby. Nobody was. On the other hand, and at exactly the right time, we saw a hen party pass through the alleyway and just before there was a man in a leather jacket – tall, relatively young. The girls saw nothing but gave us some useful evidence – they said they wouldn’t normally have gone that way after dark – too dangerous. The alleyway is the kind of place where muggings happen. Then there was Johnston’s wallet. I told Ethelred that there were no banknotes in it. He commented that some people didn’t like carrying cash, which is true. But there was small change in Johnston’s pocket. Wasn’t it more likely that the absent notes had been stolen – and the cards ignored – by somebody who didn’t fancy the risk of being caught with a dead man’s credit cards on him? Somebody who needed cash urgently but was well enough known to the police to be at risk of being stopped and searched? I think you also fell into the trap of believing that because Johnston was found dead in the alleyway there was some good reason for his being there – that he had been lured there and killed. Isn’t it more likely that it was just on his way between the hotel and wherever he was going? When we looked at the CCTV footage, he pauses as if unsure which way to go – might we not assume he was trying to work out whether the alleyway was the quickest route? Inadvisable, perhaps – and Vane, you might say, should have known better – he’d been visiting Chichester since he was in his teens. But it was of course Johnston who was killed, somebody who had never been to Chichester before and certainly wouldn’t have known what the alleyway was like.
‘Nor can you claim you shouldn’t have realised that it was an imposter we were watching. Ethelred says that Gloria at Oaklawn Studios denied vehemently that Roger Vane had ever been an extra in the series – and she should have known. She was the world expert. And yet you preferred to believe that the picture of Johnston on the wall had to be Vane in costume and that the small scar by his mouth was the clinching evidence he was who he said he was. But take away that misapprehension – trust Gloria’s evidence – and his identification becomes much shakier. The picture couldn’t have been Vane because he was never an extra. So the man with a scar at the corner of his mouth had to be somebody else. So, Johnston’s insistence that the picture was him should have made you doubly suspicious of everything else he said. And let me return briefly to my earlier point – the real Vane knew Chichester well. But the man who was murdered had to ask the hotel receptionist the way to East Street. That alone should have told you it wasn’t Vane.
‘But let’s not ignore fiction completely. I think a great fictional detective once said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. It was impossible that any of the suspects had committed the murder. You could eliminate them. In this particular case, the truth isn’t even that improbable – it’s routine. Hundreds of people are mugged in alleyways for every one who is spirited away mysteriously by the CIA. The only thing you could not reasonably be expected to know is that Leather Jacket’s name was Wayne Flood, for that is what he is called in our records. One of our junior officers recognised him. He had form, as they say. Drug dealing. Theft. Assault. We knew where he lived. We picked him up this afternoon. He’d unwisely kept the jacket, because he nicked it from a high-class store and rather liked it. So, we’ll be able to test it for Johnston’s DNA. We have little doubt we’ll find it. Case closed, I think.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
‘So,’ Elsie said. ‘I think that was one of our more successful investigations.’
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘All things are relative,’ she said. ‘Neither of us was assaulted or arrested. That’s always a plus. Nobody was made to look an idiot – or at least I wasn’t. And the murderer has been caught, though admittedly not because of anything we actually did. Job done.’
The crowds had dispersed. Joe had gone as soon as he had cleared up for us the small matter of who had killed whom. Davies had been the next to go, with one parting reminder that he had the resources to sue us all, collectively or individually, if we breathed a word of his involvement. Ogilvie excused himself on the grounds of having to earn a living, offering his services at reasonable rates should any of us have residual legal problems arising from the case. Slide had been more difficult to remove, having a larger window in his diary than the others, but had eventually accepted that the best was over and that there were no more biscuits. Cynthia and her mother, their finances on safer grounds, had headed for nearby Oxford Street. Tim, Elsie and I remained.
‘True,’ I said. ‘Job done.’
‘Except,’ said Elsie, ‘I have a horrible feeling there’s a suspect I missed. There was somebody else I was sure could have done it.’
Tuesday put her head round the door. ‘Lucinda’s just phoned. She says she got your email but she’s running late. If you breathe a word of her guilty secret, she’ll murder you. And she says she means it.’
‘Now there is somebody who could have killed Roger Norton Vane,’ said Elsie.
‘Except she didn’t,’ I said. ‘Because we know who did. What are you going to do when she arrives? It could be a tricky interview to handle.’
‘I shall be elsewhere drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows,’ said Elsie. ‘Come on, you lot, I’m buying. Hot chocolate for four with plenty of cream.’
‘I’ll get my coat,’ said Tuesday.
‘Joe was right,’ said Elsie as she picked up her handbag. ‘We all got a bit carried away. In real life, most murders are dull and routine. It’s only in crime fiction that they offer much entertainment. Of course, there’s one big advantage of real life.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘When it�
��s over, you can draw a line under it and get on with whatever you had to do – dumping the diet, for example. There’s no need for a long epilogue, explaining what happened next.’
‘Now that is very true,’ I said.
EPILOGUE
It was at his second memorial service that I finally accepted I would never meet Roger Norton Vane face-to-face.
I had got to know London quite well in the preceding months. As Elsie said, I had almost become a Londoner again. The Smoke felt like a second home. I had completed the manuscript of the Vane biography on time and the book had been rushed through editing, copy-editing and proofreading. It had appeared to good reviews, but modest sales. By then people had already started to forget Roger Norton Vane and his strange murder by proxy. It’s the actors in series who are remembered – not the writers.
The wheels had been set in motion again to have him declared dead. Cynthia had quietly repaid the money to the estate – nobody had chosen to dispute her claim that she had had no idea why Johnston had made the transfer to her account – and was now waiting to receive it again slightly more legally. She had already completed a deed of variation leaving a legacy to Tim. I have no idea whether she actually believed it when she said that she was sure he would have done the same for her.
The church was perhaps a little less full than before. It was early autumn and a few people were still away in Tuscany or Provence or Corfu or Ho Chi Minh City. Others vaguely cited pressure of work as their reason for absence, perhaps feeling that one memorial service for a given writer was plenty. Nobody was naive enough to hope for a repeat of the fun and games of the first Vane commemoration.
And yet, we had no better idea now of what had happened to Roger Norton Vane – the real Roger Norton Vane – than we had at the beginning. It was not likely that he had been whisked off by MI6 or the CIA, but it was not impossible. The mundane explanation was that he had gone off in a fit of pique and got lost – that his bones were still lying somewhere close to the path, hidden in the dense undergrowth. That, I’m sure, would be what Joe would have told us was the simple, straightforward resolution of the puzzle. But real life is sometimes more colourful, more capricious than fiction. It certainly couldn’t be quite that simple. Vane’s watch had somehow made the journey from the jungle down to the coast, and it was unlikely that it had done so on its own.
Sitting in the front row of the church, I scanned the sheet of paper in my hand. This time I was due to speak at the service. I thought I had struck the right note in what I planned to say – that Roger could be difficult, but would not have been the well-loved author he was if he had been any other way. He had attracted many strange stories, of which his brief reappearance was the strangest. But we must now sadly accept that we had seen the last of Roger Norton Vane. It was his work that would live on.
The organ had started playing and there was a general shuffling as the congregation rose. As I too got to my feet, I took a brief glance behind me to check whether there was a late arrival at the door of the church. A man in a new green anorak, perhaps, and mended plastic sandals. A man with a scar on his shoulder and fluent in Malay or Cantonese or Tagalog. A man with a story to tell.
But only the low autumn sunlight streamed through.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My apologies to the people of Selsey for implying that their morals are laxer than those of West Wittering, and possibly even on a par with the inhabitants of Brighton. They are Dr Jonathan Slide’s views rather than my own. My apologies also to anyone who tries to discover the exact location of the places I describe – I have played around here and there with the geography of Chichester. Though it would be good to think that an alleyway so perfect for murder did exist, I have invented the scene of that particular crime. Other alleyways are however available. I must also stress that the information I provide on CCTV cameras is not to be relied on for real life crimes and readers will need to carry out their own survey before committing whatever murder they have in mind.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks as ever to Susie Dunlop and everyone at Allison & Busby who helped me with this latest book in the Ethelred and Elsie series: in particular Kelly Smith, Christina Griffiths, Lesley Crooks, Daniel Scott, Ailsa Floyd, and Simon and Fliss Bage. Thanks too to my hard-working agent, David Headley, and to everyone at the DHH Agency. Congratulations and admiration to David Wardle for producing another cover that exactly matched the spirit of the book. And finally my thanks to my wife Ann for her love and support, to our daughter Catrin who read an early draft of the book, to Tom and Rachel, and to our first granddaughter Ella, who is currently more into chewing books than reading them. Hopefully this one will taste OK.
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About the Author
L. C. TYLER was born in Southend-on-Sea and then educated at Oxford and City Universities. His day jobs have included being a systems analyst, a cultural attaché and (for a few weeks one summer) working for Bomb Disposal. He has won awards for his writing, including the Last Laugh Award for the best comic crime novel of the year. He is a former chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and has been a CWA Daggers judge. L. C. Tyler has lived all over the world, but most recently in London and Sussex.
lctyler.com
By L. C. Tyler
The Herring Seller’s Apprentice
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Cat Among the Herrings
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Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2017.
This ebook edition first published in 2017.
Copyright © 2017 by L. C. TYLER
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7490-2191-7
