The Liar in the Library

by Simon Brett

  ‘Ah.’ Lennie looked at her regretfully. ‘I am not very good about time.’

  ‘Recently?’ He shrugged. ‘In the last week?’ He spread his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘Come on, Lennie,’ said Karla gently. ‘Try to remember.’

  ‘I am trying, but … nothing comes.’

  ‘Can you remember,’ asked Jude, ‘not when you last saw him, but what happened when you last saw him?’

  Lennie gave the question due consideration, but then slowly shook his head.

  ‘Where you last saw him?’

  ‘Who are we talking about?’

  ‘Pawel.’

  ‘Oh yes, Pawel.’ His brow wrinkled with the effort of memory. ‘Pawel? No, I didn’t see Pawel here in Littlehampton.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Is it in …?’ But a look froze the words on Karla’s lips. Jude did not want ideas to be planted in Lennie’s mind. She waited for him to come up with the recollection himself.

  After a long silence, she was rewarded. ‘In Fethering,’ he said slowly. ‘I saw Pawel in Fethering.’

  ‘Whereabouts in Fethering?’

  ‘In the shelter by the beach.’

  ‘When did you last see him there?’

  But Jude’s question was too insistent for him. He shook his head slowly and, as his eyes once again glazed over, he put the bottle to his lips and took another long pull of vodka.

  There was another long silence. Then he spoke again. ‘Last time I saw Pawel, he wanted some of my drink. I let him have a little. Not much. I needed it. He didn’t have drink of his own.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jude, not sure whether prompting him further was going to help.

  ‘He didn’t have drink of his own, but he had something he wanted to sell to buy drink.’

  ‘What was that?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘Silver,’ he said.

  ‘Money?’

  ‘No, made of silver. He said he knew someone who would buy it from him. A Polish person he knew. Some funny name; they all have funny names. Milo, perhaps …?’

  ‘Lennie,’ Jude repeated, ‘what was it? What was the thing Pawel was going to sell?’

  ‘A … what’s it called? For drink.’ He searched the fuddled recesses of his memory, and finally the word came to him. ‘A hipflask.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘What’s his story? I mean, that is, if you can tell me without breaching client confidentiality.’

  Karla had offered to drive Jude back to Fethering in her battered Nissan Micra. They had left Lennie between the beach huts.

  ‘No worries about that,’ she replied. ‘Lennie worked in advertising. Respectable job, mortgage, married. Probably drank too much, but in a nice middle-class way. Then his wife died, I don’t know, five years ago perhaps. That’s when he really started hitting the bottle. Soon wasn’t turning up for work, lost his job. Couldn’t pay the mortgage, the house was repossessed. Within a year, he was on the streets.’

  ‘Was it responsible, giving him the bottle of vodka?’

  Karla’s massive shoulders shrugged. ‘Stopped him from thieving to get some. And if you wanted the information …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve registered him on any number of alcohol-dependency courses. He goes to a couple of sessions, then gives up. The trouble is with all those programmes – AA, the lot – the individual has to have the will to give up the booze. Lennie hasn’t got the will. He doesn’t want to change. So, I give him what support I can, get him to a doctor if he’s actually ill, sort out accommodation, but he never stays anywhere long.’

  ‘He’s got a death wish?’

  Karla nodded grimly. ‘Since his wife died, he doesn’t want to live.’

  ‘So there’s nothing you can do about him?’

  ‘I can keep trying.’ But Karla didn’t sound hopeful.

  ‘And then one day he’ll just be found on the street, dead?’

  ‘Yes. There are some cases like that.’

  Jude agreed. She’d had clients who were the same, people she just couldn’t help. Not many, but she remembered them all very clearly, remembered them as failures on her part. Any kind of healing must have some input from the person being healed.

  There was silence in the car until they reached Woodside Cottage.

  She was pleased later that evening to have a call from Oliver Parsons. Particularly pleased because rather than going straight to the subject of the murder, he first chatted inconsequentially about the weather and the government’s latest idiocy. It revived in Jude the thought that he might be interested in her as more than a fellow investigator.

  But of course, in time he did get round to Burton St Clair’s death. ‘Just wondered if you’d heard anything new?’ he asked, characteristically casual. ‘Are you still the Number One Suspect?’

  ‘Well, I thought for a moment I was off the hook.’ And she quickly brought him up to speed with the lack of evidence on the wine bottle fragments and the new interest in Burton’s hipflask.

  ‘Ah, that’s a turn-up,’ Oliver commented slowly.

  ‘So, the police are now looking for people who knew about his habit of taking a hipflask wherever he went. Which unfortunately doesn’t get me out of the picture.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Megan says I brought up the subject when we met for lunch on Thursday. Which isn’t true. She brought it into the conversation. But I can’t deny it was mentioned.’

  ‘Megan seems to have got it in for you, doesn’t she, Jude? Insisting you had an affair with Burton, an affair which broke up her marriage. Now insisting you mentioned the hipflask. Any idea why she’s so violently anti you?’

  ‘I just think she’s mentally unbalanced.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Why, what are you thinking?’

  ‘Well, Jude, if this were one of those Golden Age crime novels I used to spend a lot of time reading …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Megan would be focusing suspicion on you to divert it away from herself.’

  ‘But she couldn’t have had anything to do with Burton’s death. As we’ve established, on the relevant evening she was staying with her friend in Scarborough.’

  ‘Yes, but if this were a Golden Age crime novel, she would have masterminded the murder and actually got someone else to do the poisoning.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘My suspicions keep coming back to Steve Chasen.’

  ‘Why particularly?’

  ‘Ever since I first met him, at the Fethering Library Writers’ Group, I had the feeling I’d seen him before somewhere. And it’s only recently I’ve worked it out.’

  ‘You had met him before?’

  ‘Not met, no. Seen.’

  ‘I’m not with you?’

  ‘Friend of mine from way back, guy called Rodge, was also a television director. Used to work on BBC arts programmes – back when the BBC did arts programmes. And there was one he did about the Wordway Trust.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Wordway Trust. It’s an organization that runs week-long residential courses for aspiring writers.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They’re tutored by professionals. There are a lot of charlatans out in the creative writing course business, but the Wordway Trust ones have quite a good reputation. Anyway, I was talking to Rodge a couple of days ago and he mentioned this film he’d made at a place called Blester Combe in Wiltshire – gosh, got to be fifteen years ago, probably more – and I realized that’s where I recognized Steve Chasen from.’

  ‘He was tutoring the course?’

  ‘No, no, the tutors are all published authors. Steve was on the course as a participant.’

  ‘An aspiring writer?’

  ‘Exactly. Which is what, I’m sure he’d be very sorry to admit, he still is.’

  ‘OK, so that’s where you’d seen him before, but why is this relevant to the investigation?’

  ‘It’s relevant, Jude, because an
other aspiring writer on the same course – and Rodge just confirmed this to me – was called Al Sinclair.’

  Di Thompson agreed to see Jude the following morning, the Tuesday. ‘Come at nine. I’ll be there, though we don’t open till ten. Used to be nine to seven every day, but the hours have been cut back. And I’m sure they’ll soon be cut back further. Money, as ever.’

  Jude asked if Carole wanted to come along with her to the library, but got a frosty response. Her neighbour said she’d already spoken to Di, the implication being that fault was being found with the way she’d conducted the bit of the investigation she’d done on her own. Jude also suspected she acted that way because the impetus for the next stage of their enquiry had come from Oliver Parsons. Carole could be so Carole at times.

  Being back at Fethering Library gave Jude both a literal and a metaphorical frisson. The weather seemed colder than ever, one of those cloud-compressed days when it would never be properly light and when the wind would continue to scythe its relentless way up from the beach. She could not help herself from wondering, a little guiltily, where Lennie had spent the night.

  And being back at the library for the first time since she’d stormed away from Burton’s car the previous week brought a chill to her soul as well.

  When Di opened the door for her, it was almost as cold inside as out. ‘Central heating takes quite a while to heat up,’ the librarian explained. ‘One of the other things in this place that should have been replaced long ago.’ She had kept on her outside coat. Jude did the same.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to follow me around,’ said Di. As she had when Carole talked to her, she was working with a trolley of books, but on this occasion she was wheeling it round the stacks, replacing returned books in their proper places.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Probably simpler if I do it. I know where everything goes.’

  Jude was surprised that someone of Di Thompson’s status was doing such a seemingly menial task. ‘I suppose all of your staff have to do a bit of everything …?’ she ventured.

  ‘“All my staff”?’ she echoed ironically. ‘That doesn’t amount to very many, I’m afraid. A bunch of part-timers, only one permanent, apart from me.’

  ‘Was that the girl who was helping last week? Is she the full-time one?’

  ‘Yes, Vix … though her definition of full-time and my own are rather at variance.’

  ‘My neighbour Carole Seddon talked to her during the week.’

  ‘Yes, I know Carole. Comes when she’s got her granddaughter with her. As do a lot of the ladies of Fethering. Sadly, they don’t come that much on their own.’

  ‘No.’ Given the opening, Jude wanted to put the next bit tactfully. ‘From what Carole said, Vix didn’t seem to be that dedicated to her job.’

  Fortunately, the librarian was more than ready to voice criticism of her junior. ‘That’s an understatement. When I started in the library service, the staff were a mixed bunch, like in any big organization, but at least they did like books, and knew about books. Many of us had relevant degrees. But with government cutbacks, local authorities can’t afford to pay people with top librarian’s qualifications. So they go for people with minimal training, call them library assistants, pay them very little, and hope they learn on the job. Which in some cases works very well – I’ve had colleagues with very bright and motivated library assistants, worked with a good few myself – but when someone like Vix Winter slips under the wire … well, it’s very difficult to get rid of them.

  ‘She’s the original of what my father used to call “a jobsworth”. For them, everything’s more than their “job’s worth”. Didn’t think there would be any in her generation, but Vix certainly qualifies. Kind of employee who’s always talking about her “job description”, and, whenever she’s asked to do anything extra, saying she’ll have to speak to her “line manager”. It’s a right pain. So, I mean, getting her to stay late for an event like Burton St Clair’s talk on Tuesday – you’d think I’d asked her to assist in a major crime. In a place like a library, you must have staff who’re prepared to go the extra mile, to help out occasionally without making a fuss. Well, I’m afraid you don’t get that kind of co-operation from Miss Vix Winter.

  ‘Which doesn’t do wonders for the kind of service we can provide, and which is why I end up doing jobs that you’d have thought would be done by a junior.’

  ‘You sound rather pessimistic about the future of libraries.’

  ‘Difficult not to be. Particularly in a tiny branch like this. Fewer borrowings, fewer people using the facilities, already cutting qualified staff and opening hours. If this was a commercial business, it would have closed down years ago.’

  ‘So why hasn’t it closed down?’

  Di shrugged at the hopelessness of the situation. ‘Because people in this country like the idea of libraries. Part of the traditional fabric of our society – books, information, education readily available, free for everyone. Whenever they do market research on this kind of thing, it turns out that people love their libraries. God, if half the people who turn out for demonstrations against the closure of libraries actually went into their local branches a couple of times a week, the whole problem would be solved!

  ‘But it’s not just that. The online world has changed everything, and libraries have been slow to catch up. Yes, the Victorian, the Edwardian library was a fine institution. But whether that model works so well in the days of Google and Wikipedia is another matter. The trouble is, there are votes in having libraries. Politicians at the national and local level hate the idea of being seen to close them down. So they keep the places going, and gradually starve them of resources. And some finally close, and some stagger on as “community libraries”, staffed by volunteers, and …’ Her words trickled away to silence.

  ‘Oh dear, I’ve really depressed myself now.’ Di Thompson slammed a couple of books into their slots with excessive vigour. ‘Sorry … Jude, was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, Jude, I’m afraid you got me on my hobby-horse.’

  ‘Don’t apologize. I found it very interesting.’

  ‘But it wasn’t what you came in here to talk about?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t, actually.’

  ‘You came in to talk about what happened to Burton St Clair here last Tuesday.’ Responding to the puzzlement in Jude’s face, Di said, ‘That’s still all anyone wants to talk about.’

  ‘Well, it might be related to that.’

  ‘Go on then.’ The librarian looked at her watch. ‘I can give you about five minutes. Then there’s other stuff I’ve got to do before I open up.’

  ‘Right, thanks. It’s just … some of the people I was chatting to after the Burton St Clair talk mentioned a Creative Writers’ Group you used to run here.’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, it wasn’t my plan to run it. I thought, when I had the idea, after a time it would become self-perpetuating, but it didn’t work out that way. Another initiative that failed, another attempt to get the library used more, to get more people coming in and out.’

  ‘How was it run?’

  ‘I organized speakers, you know, to come to the first few sessions, to get things rolling, with the idea that the participants would then run it themselves. But nobody kind of stepped up to the plate, and I was doing so much other stuff I couldn’t spare the time. Whole thing folded up within six months.’

  ‘I heard about it from Oliver Parsons.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘He said Steve Chasen was a member too.’

  Di nodded. ‘Don’t think they get on particularly well, those two.’

  ‘The speakers you say you organized, who were they?’

  ‘Local writers, people from other writers’ groups, teachers from the sixth-form colleges and the university – anyone I could rope in, really.’

  ‘Did Burton St Clair ever come to speak to them?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. Last Tuesday was the first
time he’d ever been to Fethering, so far as I know.’

  ‘How did you get in touch with him? Had you got mutual friends?’

  ‘It was through the publicity department of his publisher.’

  ‘Ah.’ Jude had been a little optimistic to think that line of questioning would lead anywhere. ‘Going off at a tangent, have you heard of an organization called the Wordway Trust?’

  ‘Yes. Set-up that runs residential writing courses?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘We’ve got some literature about them.’ The librarian gestured vaguely towards a flyer-covered table by the front doors. ‘Supposed to be quite good, I think. Why, are you contemplating taking up writing?’

  ‘No way. I don’t have that kind of creativity in me. Hated writing essays at school. Reason I was asking about them is that I heard Burton St Clair and Steve Chasen were once on the same Wordway Trust course.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, but it sounds quite possible. Why, are you thinking that Burton might have done something then to antagonize Steve sufficiently for him to exact his revenge many years later?’

  The irony in her voice now verged on sarcasm, so Jude said, ‘No, nothing like that. Well, look, I can’t thank you enough, Di, for your time, and for being so helpful. I’ll pick up one of the flyers for the Wordway Trust; might be some contact numbers I could follow up on there.’

  ‘Good morning!’

  Both women looked up at the interruption. Di Thompson showed surprise to see Eveline Ollerenshaw, dressed in a mangy mink coat that predated anti-fur campaigns.

  ‘I didn’t think you were coming in today, Evvie,’ said the librarian. ‘I thought we’d agreed that from now on you were only going to do Wednesdays and Fridays.’

  ‘Yes, but I know how busy you get. And I’m just next door. I can see when the car park fills up and there are lots of customers.’

  ‘There are no customers at this time in the morning,’ Di protested.

  ‘No, but you know what I mean. It’s no trouble for me to pop in and lend a hand. Look, right now here’s you putting back the returned books. Someone in your position shouldn’t have to do that, Di. Particularly when I’m more than happy to do it.’