Farewell My Herring Read online

  ‘That would be contrary to the Working Time Directive,’ I said.

  ‘Not on this side of Butterthwaite, apparently.’

  ‘She’s a writer herself?’ I asked.

  ‘Publishing background, did somebody say? Editing? Another John Dickson Carr fan certainly – I’ve heard her lecture on him. She’s not a bundle of laughs but she’s thorough.’

  ‘You’ve met her before then?’

  ‘Once. You don’t get to see her much unless you come up here.’

  ‘Did you ever hear the rumour she used to be a spy – that she still is one?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone’s heard that one. CIA, somebody told me.’

  ‘But you don’t believe it?’

  ‘Even the grimmest of CIA operatives occasionally allow themselves to break into a half-smile.’

  ‘Good point,’ I said. ‘I’ll drop your bag off on my way to my room, shall I?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Elsie

  I was already in the main sitting room when Ethelred came back down, having unpacked his little bag. I had been enjoying the ambience – the diffused light from the table lamps scattered round the room, the old and comfortable sofas covered with faded William Morris fabric, the low beamed ceiling, the roaring fire in the vast stone fireplace, the storm rattling the narrow casement windows. It was a picture of England drawn by somebody who clearly loved it but hadn’t been there lately.

  Sadly, though this was Ethelred’s natural habitat, his arrival did nothing to enhance the charming representation of a bygone era. He was one of the unhappiest bunnies in the North. Ripon, he said, had proved even smaller and colder than he had feared, and the ceiling height was inconveniently low. There was no desk for him to work at, because there was no space for one. And blah, blah, blah. After a bit, I started listening again.

  ‘Did I ask you to be as tall as you are?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think so. Don’t complain to me about ceiling heights. I am responsible for negotiating your book contracts and the payment of advances and royalties after very reasonable agency deductions. Anyway, some bits of the room must be over six foot high.’

  He looked mournful, though he does that even when things are going really well. ‘The ceiling is mainly sloping,’ he said. ‘I think it must have been a storeroom originally. I can only stand upright in a couple of places.’

  ‘There you are then. How many places can you be in at any one time? I mean, you’re not God. You’re not obliged to be omnipresent. You have a place to stand up and a spare one if you feel like moving around. And you can lie down, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can lie down, though a longer bed would also be helpful.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want a long bed in a room that small. And, as I said, it was entirely your decision to be tall. It’s not a mistake I ever made.’

  ‘How is your room?’ he enquired, with only partly justified suspicion.

  ‘My suite, you mean? I haven’t had time to explore it all yet,’ I said. ‘Ask me in a day or so.’

  ‘How …?’ He frowned, as he often does when things puzzle him.

  ‘How did I get a better room than you? Forward planning, Ethelred. The moment I agreed to do this gig, I checked on the internet for reviews of the courses … have I ever explained the internet to you?’

  He looked even more mournful and said that he used the internet all the time, as I knew well.

  ‘Then,’ I continued patiently, ‘you could have easily discovered on Tripadvisor that Malham was the master bedroom suite of the former owner of the house and much in demand. I emailed at once, and my small and very reasonable request was granted, while you were probably still sharpening your quill pen and looking for a sheep to kill in order to make parchment.’

  ‘Actually I emailed too, though I’m not sure how she gets emails up here. There isn’t a landline and there’s no mobile reception at all.’

  ‘I suppose she drives down to Butterthwaite,’ I said. ‘You can get a signal there. She downloads everything and comes back here to draft replies. Then she goes back down again a few days later to send them. I think modern technology impacts on her life even less than it does on yours.’

  ‘I’m surprised you can do business like that in the modern world.’

  ‘Ethelred, trust me, you know nothing about the modern world. It’s not somewhere you’ve ever been.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to be this cut off myself. What if she had an accident?’

  ‘If she really wanted an accident, she’d have to drive down to Butterthwaite to have it. Otherwise, she’d have to manage without. Generations must have lived up here, when you think about it, contentedly cut off from the rest of society. It’s only the twenty-first century that thinks it has to be online twenty-four seven in order not to miss out.’

  He nodded. He didn’t doubt for one moment that the past had been a better and happier world, and that the 1950s had been the best of all. In a way he was right – I mean, those skirts! Those elbow-length gloves! Those pillbox hats! Those crazy sunglasses! Wall-to-wall rock-and-roll in cafes made entirely of red and cream vinyl! But I’m not sure that’s the side of it that he was thinking of.

  ‘I suppose she must really like the isolation,’ he said eventually.

  The door opened, so we immediately stopped talking until we’d checked it wasn’t Wendy. It proved to be a writer whom I knew quite well, dressed in his usual black jeans, black T-shirt and leather jacket.

  ‘Good to see you, Jasper,’ I said, kissing him an inch or so from both cheeks. He possessed one of those untrustworthy faces that you didn’t want to get too close to, in case you caught deviousness. And anyway he always had a covering of itchy dark stubble on his chin. The gap between his front teeth, endearing in most people, simply added to the impression he was a disreputable minor character from a black-and-white movie. All he was lacking was the pencil moustache and the ebony cigarette holder. In that sense at least, he and Ethelred were blood brothers. ‘You two know each other, I take it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Jasper Lavant replied, showing the classic Mid-Century incisor gap to perfection. ‘We were on a panel together at Bristol last year.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Well, it was somebody very much like you. We had a conversation about royalties. You were saying you were earning so little, you might as well give up writing. Only tutoring was keeping you going.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘It sounds very much like you, Ethelred. Was it said in a really self-pitying way?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jasper.

  ‘It still wasn’t me,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Murder Unlimited is selling well,’ I said, turning to Jasper. ‘Number two in the Sunday Times last weekend. Well done, you!’

  ‘Yes, it’s had a bit of a resurgence since they announced the TV series.’

  I caught Ethelred’s eye for an instant. We both knew that Jasper’s next four books had been complete dross, but his debut, Murder Unlimited, had made him a packet. And his first post-TV book would probably be quite profitable too. He was still worth having as a client if I could prise him away from his current agent, whoever that was. I had two and a half days to butter him up.

  ‘A truly great book,’ I said, as sincerely as I could manage without actually sicking up.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘A classic.’

  ‘You are too kind.’

  ‘The sort of book you can’t put down. A real page-turner.’

  ‘It had some good reviews,’ he said, with a very poor attempt at a modest smile.

  I decided to stop there, never having read it. You can get badly caught out by being too specific about a book you’ve merely considered reading if you run out of other stuff. Now I realised I should have promoted it up the to-be-read pile and glanced at the opening chapter. Of course, I couldn’t download it onto my Kindle here. But maybe there would be a dog-eared copy on th
e bookshelves. It was the sort of book you regularly found abandoned on the bookshelves of guest houses and holiday cottages, treated as some reader’s plaything, then cruelly tossed aside. Still, if you keep telling an author his books are wonderful, he rarely tests your knowledge chapter by chapter.

  ‘You came up by train?’ asked Ethelred conversationally.

  ‘That was the advice, wasn’t it?’ said Jasper. ‘Reduce the centre’s carbon footprint. The comment about the state of the road up here was also an inducement to leave the Porsche at home.’

  Other writers might have just said ‘car’. Jasper had however spotted an opportunity to remind us that he normally drove the sort of car that people like us only ever saw as a puff of exhaust vanishing down the fast lane. I suspected he’d driven one for years. He’d been in banking or something before he became an author. Financially, he probably needed a TV series less than any other writer I knew. But he had the contract, signed and sealed, with a household name already recruited to play the lead. That life might be fair has never been an assumption of my agency’s business plan.

  ‘I wonder why Wendy does it?’ said Jasper. ‘Living up here, I mean. Rumour has it that she never leaves.’

  ‘I’ve met her at Harrogate,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Yes, I mean obviously she gets away for a few hours now and then, but not for long apparently. I’ve heard—’ Jasper looked quickly towards the door. ‘Word on the street is that she’s part of some MI6 operation, based here at the hall. The whole courses thing is just a front.’

  ‘Why would MI6 want a base in the middle of nowhere?’ asked Ethelred.

  ‘That’s the point of it,’ said Jasper. He tapped the side of his nose to tell u that what he was about to say was both in confidence and undeniably true. ‘It’s a sort of safe house where they can hide somebody when they need to. No one sees them come or go. And if it gets too hot here, they can head off to some shepherd’s hut close by.’

  ‘You know that, then?’ asked Ethelred stiffly. He didn’t much like Jasper, in spite of the shared nostalgia thing. Not many people did when they got to know Jasper well. Too smug. Too full of being Jasper. Too obviously rich in a profession that mainly isn’t.

  ‘Research, dear boy,’ he said. ‘I have a few contacts who happen to be in that line of work. They tell me things.’

  ‘I would have thought that the Official Secrets Act would have limited what they could reveal.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. I’ve reached the stage when pals from my university days have got themselves quite high up in all sorts of organisations – some of which Joe Public has probably never even heard of. Insider knowledge and good solid research is what distinguishes the best fiction from the mediocre.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Ethelred, who probably hadn’t updated his police procedures since he started writing crime fiction, at a time when you could still have a good night out for five shillings and listen to Arthur Askey on the wireless when you got home.

  I wondered if Jasper really knew anything we didn’t, or even believed what he was saying. Jasper practised bullshitting in the way a violinist practises scales. And I didn’t rate Jasper’s research that highly if the best he could come up with was a shepherd’s hut. I mean, honestly? Hadn’t they all been sold off to former cabinet ministers to write their memoirs in? But then I remembered the buttering-up thing and the fifteen-per-cent-of-the-advance thing relating to his next TV-tie-in book, which would sell so much better than the recent shit ones, even if it was shit too. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Absolutely, Jasper,’ I said. ‘Insider knowledge and good solid research. You are so right. I mean – Murder Unlimited – the background research that must have gone into that! So impressive.’

  ‘In what way?’ he asked.

  I revised my assumption that writers never cross-examined you when you were giving them ridiculously lavish compliments.

  ‘In every possible way,’ I said.

  ‘But you mean a particular part of the plot?’

  ‘The ending,’ I said. It seemed safe. Most books have endings. His probably did too. I’d check when I could get hold of a copy.

  ‘That’s odd. The one criticism I’ve had of the book was the ending. The TV people want to change it.’

  ‘Do they? Idiots! It’s a great ending. Trust me.’

  ‘I’d do it differently if I were writing the book now.’

  ‘Well, I think it takes tremendous skill to do it your way,’ I said. ‘So, tell me about the TV—’

  ‘What do you mean exactly?’ Jasper was understandably puzzled, having read his book himself and knowing how it ended. ‘You liked my making it obvious who the killer is early on, and then not putting in the final twist that everyone was expecting?’

  ‘Yes. That’s it. A masterstroke. It’s the sort of thing Christie might have done.’

  ‘But actually didn’t. So – let’s get this right – you really have read the book?’

  ‘Obviously. Cover to cover.’

  ‘And you say you quickly realised who the killer was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wasn’t there one of the other characters you suspected along the way? I mean there must have been somebody?’

  You really needed to have at least read the blurb on the back to have a chance of getting that one right. Of course, I could make an inspired guess. What were the chances of a suspect called Smith? Quite good? Or I could randomly plump for a name like Juliet. No, better not risk it.

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I didn’t suspect any of the others.’

  ‘Not even Juliet?’ he asked. ‘I mean she had a pretty good motive, didn’t she?’

  ‘Juliet! Ha! You almost had me fooled there,’ I said with a care-free choking noise. ‘I admit that. But I’ve read a lot of crime fiction.’

  ‘You do actually like crime fiction then?’

  At first sight, this was a much easier question to answer. But my brain was no longer functioning at that basic level. A simple ‘yes’ would no longer satisfy its overwhelming need for evasion and ambiguity.

  ‘Like it?’ I said. ‘Hell, does a rat catcher like rats?’

  ‘OK. Fair enough …’ He was looking at me oddly. We were both wondering exactly what rat catchers did think of rats. Plague-spreaders but totally essential to their business model? Maybe that.

  It was then that the door opened, and we all turned towards it, which was fine with me because I was done with buttering up and wanted to quit while I was ahead.

  ‘Hi, Hal,’ said Ethelred to the young man who had just arrived.

  ‘Hi, Ethelred,’ he replied.

  ‘Do you both know Hal Compton?’ Ethelred asked us.

  Jasper didn’t, though he had heard of him and congratulated Hal on the success of his latest book. I did know him and, this time, had actually read the book in question, because he’d sent it to me and I’d turned it down. These things happen. Still, I had good reason to have noticed that The Spy Before Yesterday had been number one on the same Sunday Times list that had featured Jasper as number two. The course participants were, if you ignored Ethelred, getting value for money this weekend. Hal Compton’s career had been the mirror image of Jasper’s. His early books – humorous crime fiction with G. K. Chesterton as the detective – had scarcely been noticed by reviewers and had not sold well. Then he’d switched, suddenly and unexpectedly, to thrillers and now The Spy Before Yesterday looked like being the crime novel of the year. That was why you hung onto people like Ethelred – however bad their current sales were – you just never knew when they might suddenly make their breakthrough. Of course, I’d chosen the wrong one to keep and the wrong one to reject, but the principle was still sound.

  I placed a hand on the sleeve of Hal’s pale blue cashmere sweater. It felt of vastly increased royalty payments. ‘I’m really pleased that your book is doing so well,’ I said. I hoped Jasper didn’t notice the difference between what I’d said to him earlier and what I was saying when I was being gen
uine, because I was pleased for Hal, in spite of his being with another agent. Of course, I’d stolen clients from Francis and Nowak before, and there’s no legal quota on the number of writers you’re allowed to steal from a rival agency, but from what I knew of Hal he was too decent to desert Janet Francis when she’d sold his most successful book for him. I respected that totally. Obviously I was still going to try though.

  He looked slightly embarrassed in a way that Jasper had not and said ‘Yes, it came at exactly the right time. My last publisher had dropped me, we’d just had a baby and I was getting fairly desperate about cash flow. I thought I might actually have to get a real job. Then I suddenly seemed to hit on the right idea …’ His voice tailed off and just for a moment I thought he was actually going to blush. ‘Well, there it is. There’s a lot of luck in these things. Well done on the television series, by the way, Jasper.’

  ‘As you say, there’s often a lot of luck in these things,’ said Jasper. He placed a slight but significant emphasis on ‘often’.

  Hal flicked away a boyish lock of blonde hair and smiled. ‘Did any of you hear the row from the kitchen just now? Wendy and her minion were having a bit of a disagreement.’

  ‘Jenny Cosham,’ said Ethelred, who must have been interested enough to ask somebody what Jenny’s surname was.

  ‘I overheard a bit,’ said Jasper. ‘As I came past the door. Jenny wanted to go to her mother’s birthday party tonight, but the snow has stopped her. Tough luck for the girl.’

  ‘I think Wendy was always planning to keep her here tonight, if she could,’ said Ethelred. ‘I don’t think that not telling her our taxi was there was any sort of accident.’

  This was probably true. Wendy did not tolerate randomness of any sort. I’m not saying that she’d already planned out the rest of her life day by day, but she’d established the general principles of how it would be, both for herself and for others – especially others.