The Herring in the Library Read online

  ‘My bit of it is those two windows up there,’ I said. ‘It’s all flats now.’

  ‘Such a shame,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t really be allowed to mess around with old houses like that.’

  The last distant notes of the Jaguar’s engine had long since faded away. I was about to touch my forelock and take my leave when Shagger suddenly said: ‘Well, behind that bay window must be a very pleasant sitting room, and behind that sitting room there must be a well-stocked kitchen with a kettle and a jar of coffee. I suppose you’ve no plans to invite me back?’

  Briefly I felt like Mole being addressed, and slightly patronized, by Ratty. I tried to remember whether I’d left a bucket of whitewash in the hallway . . . or was that Badger?

  ‘Yes, do come back for a coffee,’ I said. ‘If you’ve nothing better to do.’

  ‘What could I have better to do than have coffee with an old chum? Lead on, Macduff,’ he said.

  I wondered whether to correct his Shakespearean quotation, but, concluding that Shagger might not yet have heard of Shakespeare, I simply indicated the way. Shagger strode ahead, his hands behind his back, the well-loved squire walking at a measured pace and in very shiny shoes through his new village.

  That was the first of a number of such meetings. Our relations with people often fall into patterns that are almost unique to them, without seeming in any way out of the ordinary. In Robert’s case (I quickly ceased to think of him as ‘Shagger’) the pattern proved to be that he would drop in without warning, whenever he ventured into the village for a newspaper or some other minor purchase. He expected me to be at home, as indeed I usually was – we third-rate writers don’t get out that much. Robert and I would have coffee and he would talk about our time at university or his time in the City. I was occasionally allowed to contribute to his narrative – for example to remind him how narrowly and unfairly he had missed a boxing blue or to tease him gently about his success with women or capacity for drinking beer. I often envied his gift of partial recall. Once when talking about academic matters he mentioned in passing that it was a shame he had missed getting a first – that he had also missed getting a second apparently troubled him less.

  He would ask occasionally about my books, but was always satisfied with the briefest of answers. Often they were the same answers I had given him the previous week. We rarely trespassed very far into the present. Even the past seemed to stop short at the day he had left the bank.

  ‘It was time to go, Ethelred,’ he said, one day when our conversation had fleetingly edged up to that point and then backed abruptly away. ‘You have to know when it’s time to go. No point in lingering.’ And the conversation had reverted to a rugby match against Teddy Hall in which Robert had (he reminded me) played a starring role.

  But why it had been time to go and what would have happened had he lingered were topics that were always skilfully sidestepped.

  ‘You’re lucky to have this little place,’ he said more than once. ‘Everything you want to hand. No gardens requiring continuous maintenance by expensive staff. No dry rot hiding in the cellar. Just a snug little bolthole.’

  ‘Bolthole from what, Robert?’ I asked. ‘This is what I have. This is it.’

  ‘Capital little place, all the same,’ he said, taking in most of the flat in a single glance.

  Again, I felt I was being patronized, but perhaps justifiably so. I could, as Elsie had tactfully pointed out, scarcely claim even to be a second-rate crime writer. I had a bank balance that was entirely appropriate to my literary status. Robert had, for a time, run one of the biggest financial institutions in the City. He could afford to retire – grey-haired and with the beginnings of a stoop perhaps, but still a relatively young man. He was Sir Robert Muntham KCBE of Muntham Court. I wasn’t.

  Part of the pattern too was that his wife did not join him on these visits. It was several weeks before I met her. Annabelle proved to be some years younger than he was – an elegant and rather tense woman, who (I was later told) had had a reasonably successful career as a model before settling down and not having children. I’m not sure our first meeting was a success.

  ‘This is Ethelred, one of my very oldest chums,’ Robert had said, when the three of us happened to coincide outside the post office one morning.

  ‘You live here – in Findon?’ she asked, suggesting that Robert had not mentioned his chum much, if at all, on his return with The Times or a tube of toothpaste.

  ‘I have a flat over there,’ I said, anxious to avoid any repetition of the error that Robert had fallen into. ‘It’s just a couple of rooms up on the first floor.’

  She looked from me to the flat and then back again. ‘That must be very . . .’ she said. But she was unable to come up with any advantages to living in a small flat just outside Worthing. ‘So, what do you do, Alfred?’ she asked.

  ‘Ethelred,’ I said. ‘As for what I do, I am a writer.’

  ‘I thought you said “Ethelred”, but then I decided I must have misheard. Do you write under your own name – no, surely not?’

  I told her the three names that I wrote under.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve read any of your books,’ she said. It’s a response I’m used to. Really, it doesn’t bother me any more. ‘What do you write?’ she added.

  ‘Crime mainly – as J. R. Elliot and Peter Fielding anyway. When I’m being Amanda Collins I write romantic fiction.’

  She shook her head. She hadn’t heard of any of me. ‘So, do you write hard-boiled crime?’

  ‘Not really. My victims die almost painlessly and usually with the minimum of blood to clean up afterwards.’

  ‘Is that realistic?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I must read one of your books anyway. Which do you recommend?’

  I named a couple at random. Other than that the J. R. Elliot books are set in the fourteenth century and the Peter Fielding books in the present day, they’re all much of a muchness.

  ‘I hope you remember those titles, Robert,’ she said to her husband.

  Robert winked at me before saying: ‘Of course, dearest.’

  At that point Lady Muntham recalled that she needed to get some steak from the butcher but, before she set out on the fifty yards or so of road that separated us from Peckham’s, she added: ‘You must come and have dinner with us, Ethelred.’

  I acknowledged, with a thin smile, a promise that I did not expect would ever be honoured. Then, a couple of weeks later a gilt-edged card arrived. When I next saw Robert, I apologized for the fact that I had invited my agent down to stay that weekend and so would be unable to attend.

  Which was how I ended up sitting in my flat with Elsie discussing evening wear.

  ‘Come on, Tressider,’ she said. ‘Or we’re going to be late for Lord Snooty and his pals. I don’t know what you were thinking about but you were miles away there. You’ve got to do five hundred words before dinner. No flashbacks.’

  ‘I always end up writing flashbacks,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of writer I am.’

  At Muntham Court

  ‘Come closer to the fire, Master Thomas.’

  ‘The fire? Thank you, my lady. You are kind. Very kind. Too kind.’

  Yes, decidedly, just that little bit too kind, thought Master Thomas, inching closer as instructed, but no further than politeness dictated. The heat from this blaze was uncomfortable, even in January. Nevertheless, he rubbed his small, soft hands in front of it. Well-seasoned logs from the estate had had the snow dusted from them and had been piled by liveried serving men into the vast stone fireplace. The flames now leapt upwards into the cavernous, soot-crusted chimney, seemingly as eager to please Her Ladyship as everyone else who came in contact with her.

  Clever things, these chimneys. Thomas, like most people, had grown up in a house where smoke escaped through a blackened hole in the roof, to the extent that it escaped at all. Now everyone was building houses with chimneys. That was modern times for you. And who knew what wonders
the fifteenth century might bring?

  ‘Sharing the fire with you makes it no less warm for me,’ said the lady. ‘And you have had a long and cold journey from London.’

  ‘The radiance of your welcome warmed me the moment I stepped across your threshold, my lady. No fire needed. None at all. Not a single log. Scarcely even a twig.’

  ‘Are you a flatterer, Master Thomas, because you are a poet or because you are a courtier?’

  The problem, thought Master Thomas, was that he was unable to have a conversation with this lady without babbling like an inhabitant of the Bethlehem Hospital. Still, it was a good question: poet or courtier? Both would be better than the day job.

  ‘I am a poor poet, Your Ladyship, and no courtier. I am just a humble customs officer, as Your Ladyship knows. And words that would acknowledge the name of flattery are clearly no flattery at all. So if I confess to being a flatterer, I am none.’

  ‘But you are more than a humble customs officer if the King entrusts you with important messages for my husband.’

  Thomas looked up from his contemplation of the fire and his calculation as to what it would cost to install a modest chimneypiece in his own small house at Blackfriars.

  ‘Your husband thinks not. He wondered that the King had troubled me with a message of such insignificance.’

  ‘I am sure that the King would not waste his servants’ time.’

  ‘That shows how little you know of kings, Your Ladyship, if you would pardon me for pointing out your good fortune. But your husband raised the same point. He thought that there must be more to it. He enquired whether the message might perhaps be in code.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘I can tell Your Ladyship no more than I could tell Sir Edmund. Messages in code are to be understood by the sender and the receiver. I am neither. I am merely a—’

  ‘—humble clerk. Yes, I think you’ve said that already.’

  ‘Humble customs officer, was what I was planning to say. Formerly apprentice to an apothecary. But “clerk” if you will. It is as Your Ladyship wishes.’

  ‘And what did the message say?’

  ‘I gave it to your husband sealed, just as it left the King.’

  ‘The King had sealed it himself?’

  ‘It bore the King’s personal seal. The Signet.’

  ‘And how does my husband intend to reply?’

  ‘Sir Edmund will inform me when he returns from hunting,’ said Thomas. ‘I am to wait. I must confess that I had hoped he would return much earlier. I fear that the light is now fading. These January days are short.’

  ‘You will stay the night, Master Thomas, and set out for London in the morning. A place can be found for you to sleep. You will be more comfortable here than in some miserable inn on the London road. However soon my husband returns, there is no question of your going anywhere this evening. I must in any case think of a suitable response to your other missive.’

  ‘The poem from my master?’

  ‘Indeed. Master Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem.’

  ‘I believe no reply is expected.’

  ‘But of course a poem must be replied to! You know little of chivalry, Master Thomas.’

  ‘That is true, my lady. Though I read romances avidly when I was young.’

  ‘Arthur and Guinevere?’

  ‘Roland and Charlemagne. Whatever I could get my hands on.’

  ‘And did you dream of being a knight? Did you dream of carrying a sword?’

  ‘My dagger is sword enough,’ said Thomas, patting the ballock knife that hung from his belt. ‘I am not entirely certain that I would know how to use it in a fight, but it would be unwise to travel the roads with no visible means of defence. A fly may be swatted with impunity, but the smallest wasp is accorded some respect. In any case, the dagger is useful for cutting up sausages.’

  ‘You would use your Excalibur for cutting up sausages? Fie! I think those romances were wasted on you,’ smiled the lady.

  ‘I tell the stories to my children at bedtime,’ said Thomas. ‘Sometimes I do make Arthur cut up sausages with Excalibur. It is a fault with all my stories that I will sacrifice both character and plot to amuse my audience.’

  The lady frowned. ‘You have children? And a wife? But then . . .’

  ‘I have a wife to whom I am devoted and three children, to whom we are both devoted in equal measure – Richard, Geoffrey and little Blanche. Blanche is the youngest – she is just walking. You appear perplexed, my lady. It is entirely natural that a man of my age would have a family.’

  ‘No, of course. It was just . . . they must miss you when you are away.’ The lady gave a tight-lipped smile. Thomas instinctively looked over his shoulder towards the door, then wondered why he had done it. The lady seemed ill at ease for no apparent reason. Perhaps she did not like children? There were no children in the house. If she were unable to bear children herself, it might be distasteful to her to discuss the children of others? But surely she herself had raised the subject?

  ‘I am often away on the King’s business,’ said Thomas, breaking the silence. ‘The children are used to it. I have promised them a new story when I return. As I ride, I make up stories. It passes the time. It was a long journey down to Sussex, so I have thought of two so far.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the lady, ‘you must tell them to your children if . . . when you return.’

  ‘I shall do so,’ said Thomas.

  The conversation lapsed inexplicably. The lady twisted the bunch of keys tied to her kirtle.

  ‘They should not have sent you,’ she exclaimed with a sudden determination. ‘Not you. It was wrong of them. Perhaps indeed you should go now. I think that would be best.’

  ‘I fear,’ said Thomas with a shrug, ‘that it is already too late. I am, as it were, here. I shall have to accept your kind hospitality. I hope, my lady, that you would not throw me out into the snow merely because I have three children and place mirth before gallantry. But I must in any case wait for Sir Edmund. Those are my instructions.’ He gave a slight bow. She did not smile in response.

  ‘Yes, too late . . .’ she repeated, though not to Master Thomas.

  There was another pause, during which the fire crackled and spat. A dog sleeping close to the hearth opened one eye, rolled over and stretched out its legs. Then the thing that they seemed to have been waiting for happened.

  The outer door to the great hall was flung open and three men strode into the room bringing winter with them. Thomas felt the bitter rush of cold air and noticed white specks on their cloaks – specks that were fading one by one as he watched, leaving small damp patches. It must be snowing again outside, he thought. Perhaps they were three of Sir Edmund’s men who had ridden on ahead to announce his arrival. They certainly seemed to think they belonged here. He turned to the lady as if hoping for some sort of introduction, but she stood mute and staring in their direction. She wanted desperately to say something, but seemed to be waiting for a cue.

  The tallest of the three, a man with grizzled hair and a short beard, advanced until he was just a yard or so away from the lady. He carried a quiet authority – not one of Sir Edmund’s men, then, but a knight himself, perhaps, with his own retainers.

  ‘Lady Catherine . . .’ he began.

  ‘You bear bad news?’ she gasped.

  ‘I bear . . . yes, the news is bad. It is the worst. Please prepare yourself . . .’

  ‘My husband . . .’

  ‘Sir Edmund is dead,’ said the man very quickly. ‘He was . . .’

  ‘By whom?’ gasped Lady Catherine. Then, seeing the expression on the man’s face, she suddenly fell silent.

  ‘He was stabbed with a dagger,’ the man continued very slowly and precisely. ‘By an unknown assailant.’

  ‘Who escaped . . .’

  ‘Indeed . . . as you say . . . who escaped. But we have a description. A short man, with the appearance of a clerk, carrying a dagger and speaking in the manner of one from London.’

&n
bsp; The three men and the lady turned as one to look at Thomas. The dog (who clearly knew whose side he was on) growled softly.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Thomas, ‘that I haven’t seen any other clerks from London near here.’

  ‘Nor have I,’ said the man. He turned to his two companions. ‘Arrest this clerk,’ he said.

  Thomas blinked a couple of times. No, they were all still there. This was still happening. ‘To what end?’ he asked, as well as his dry mouth would allow.

  ‘We think you may be able to help us with our inquiries.’

  ‘About the stabbing? I met Sir Edmund only briefly. He was alive when I last saw him.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘I assure you that there’s nothing I can remember that would be of any assistance to you gentlemen . . .’

  ‘Perhaps we can jog your memory then,’ said the man.

  ‘I can’t quite see how you would be able to do that.’

  ‘Ever been tortured before?’ asked the man.

  ‘No,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Well, now’s your chance.’

  I reread what I had just written. I rarely begin a novel at chapter one and work methodically through a manuscript. Often I will write the ending quite early on and progress steadily towards it. Here I had obviously begun halfway through. I was not yet sure why Master Thomas had been dispatched to Sussex. Clearly he had been sent by his master, Geoffrey Chaucer, and clearly he had been dumped right in it. But why? And why had I chosen to set it at Muntham Court? Lady Catherine knew a great deal more than she had let on. Was she complicit in her husband’s murder? If so, was she the instigator or somebody else’s pawn . . .?

  ‘Come on, Tressider, I said five hundred words, not half a novel,’ said Elsie, looking round the door.

  ‘It’s only one thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one words – hardly half a novel even by my standards.’

  ‘Whatever. Just save it and close the lid. The sooner we go to your snooty friends, the sooner we can piss off back home. I like the neck wear, by the way – I’ve never seen a bow tie at that angle before. Original.’