The Herring in the Library Read online

  I closed the lid of my laptop as instructed and furtively straightened my tie.

  ‘I’ll get the car keys,’ I said.

  Three

  Elsie had insisted that we drive.

  ‘It’s scarcely a ten-minute walk,’ I’d pointed out, ‘and it’s a lovely summer evening.’

  ‘I’m not walking up some muddy lane in high heels, thank you very much. You’ve been away from London too long, Tressider. You think mud is fine if it doesn’t reach to the tops of your Hunters. We have something called pavements in London. Once you have them fitted in Sussex we’ll walk as much as you like. Until then you get to drive me.’

  Elsie discovered she had in fact left in my flat (to which she is a frequent visitor) something in black silk that would pass as an evening dress and that she imagined suited her short but well-rounded figure. She had also at some point in the past left a pair of black high-heeled shoes in my care. The heels increased her height by many inches, but not by enough of them to quite carry off the black silk item, which had been abandoned with me for good reason. I wondered whether to suggest she went as a Transylvanian fishwife after all, but decided not. Long experience had taught me just to tell Elsie that she looked great and to keep my fingers crossed for next time.

  So, the wheels of my Mini crunched up the gravel drive, now in deep shadow from the two rows of ancient trees that flanked it, and performed a spacious arc in front of Muntham Court. I applied the brake and went round to open Elsie’s door.

  Findon has a number of large houses. The undoubtedly quaint Findon Manor, the oldest of them, has long been a hotel. Findon Place is an impressive small Georgian mansion, carefully positioned to suggest that it owns the church. Findon Park is set in large grounds just outside the village. But Muntham Court eclipses them all. When it was rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century, its owner had made concessions neither to economy nor to good taste. The house was vast and designed in equal measure for comfort and for putting visitors in their place. Nominally it was in the Jacobean style but the architect had been paid cash to lift features from any and every period. There were pilasters in profusion and ogees in abundance. Balustrades flowed and anything that could be ornamented was ornamented. Contemporaries might have claimed to despise it, but time had mellowed and softened everything. Few people ascended the drive and caught their first glimpse of the house between its neatly cut hedges without experiencing the intended sense of envy.

  ‘I was expecting something bigger,’ said Elsie non-committally as she stepped from the car.

  ‘It’s stunning,’ I said, still holding the door. ‘It’s like some fairy-tale castle out of the Morte d’Arthur. You would expect Sir Bedivere to come riding out of the shrubbery on his palfrey and greet a pale damsel on the lawn with a courtly bow.’

  ‘Whatever you say, pet,’ said Elsie. ‘Anyway, it’s good we’ve got here before too many people try parking their palfreys.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So we are well positioned to make a quick getaway if your friends turn out to be really boring.’

  We were in fact one of two cars parked in front of the house – the other was a large green Jaguar. It looked familiar, but I didn’t have a chance to comment on this to Elsie. As I locked the Mini, the front door of Muntham Court was thrown open and Lady Muntham walked towards us. She appeared every inch the gracious hostess in a midnight-blue dress that shimmered in the rays of a waning sun. Her blonde hair was tied back in a bun. The pearls that she wore round her neck were large but (in my view) very tasteful. She had perhaps applied a little too much make-up, but she had once been a model. Her smile lit up the garden.

  ‘Ethelred,’ said Lady Muntham, placing her hand on my arm. ‘It’s so sweet of you to come. And this must be Elise?’

  ‘Elsie,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Elsie, of course. And you must call me Annabelle.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’d been planning to do,’ said Elsie.

  Annabelle led us through a hallway, paved with black and white tiles and containing an oak staircase that swept upwards into the mock-Tudor gloom. From there we proceeded, past a billiard room, into a conservatory that was, in its way, scarcely smaller or less grand than the hall. Its Victorian architect, having perhaps recently visited the Crystal Palace, had put together a vaulted structure of steel and glass. In its humid microclimate, stunted palms had clung on gamely through decades of neglect. Rattan-framed sofas added to the illusion that we had temporarily been transported to some distant and rather downmarket part of the Empire. Beyond the dusty glass panes a blood-red sun was beginning to set.

  ‘Robert is delayed for a moment,’ Annabelle said, pouring our drinks. She glanced towards the door, then added absentmindedly: ‘I think you said you would like a lemonade, Elise?’

  ‘You are so very kind,’ said ‘Elise’ in a strangely simpering tone that put me on my guard at once.

  ‘And a whisky for you, Ethelred.’

  I took the heavy lead crystal in my hand. The whisky seemed a long way down at the bottom, but it was a large glass.

  ‘It’s so airy in here,’ I said, looking at the evening light reflected off the glossy palm fronds.

  ‘It makes a change from the oak panelling in the rest of the house,’ said Annabelle with a smile.

  ‘You’re not into oak panelling, then, Annabelle?’ Elsie piped up from just behind my shoulder.

  ‘It’s all Grade One listed,’ said Annabelle regretfully. ‘There’s not much we can do about it.’

  ‘You could do white emulsion,’ said Elsie. ‘Or magnolia. You’d need more than one coat, of course. It’s on special offer at B&Q at the moment.’

  Annabelle gave me a tight-lipped scowl. Then she looked away and said: ‘It really is too rude of Robert not to be here. I’m going to chase him out of wherever he is.’

  She swished from the room, leaving Elsie and me alone.

  ‘Could you get your eyes to stop following her every movement like some lovesick puppy?’ said Elsie. ‘Just for a moment, at least? And could you kindly kick her hard every time she calls me “Elise”?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you do. Who does she remind you of?’

  ‘Annabelle? She reminds me of nobody in particular.’

  ‘I’ll give you a clue: it’s the unprincipled slapper you were formerly married to. Would you like to make a guess now?’

  ‘Annabelle’s not a bit like Geraldine.’

  ‘She’s a tad taller, I’ll grant you. She’s definitely not a real blonde and my hunch is those aren’t the tits that God gave her. But I do know an unprincipled slapper when I see one. Steer clear of her unless you have authority from me in writing. In which lap-dancing establishment did your friend Shagger pick her up?’

  ‘I don’t know where Sir Robert and Lady Muntham met,’ I said. ‘By the way, please don’t address him as Shagger and please don’t suggest to anyone else they met in a lap-dancing club.’

  Elsie smiled. She may have intended it as an enigmatic smile, but it failed to conceal the general shape of her plan.

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. There are some people you can’t trust to behave themselves at dinner parties once they’ve had a few drinks. I didn’t trust Elsie even on lemonade, but I also knew there was nothing I could do about it.

  ‘The hall, the conservatory, the billiard room,’ said Elsie contemplatively.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘This isn’t a dinner party – we’re back playing Cluedo.’

  ‘Only if one of us gets murdered,’ I said with a confident smile. ‘How likely do you think that is?’

  ‘It’s the host that gets murdered in Cluedo, so it’s only Shagger who’s got any worries. Do you think that’s why he’s not here? The former lap dancer’s already bumped him off?’

  ‘I am sure Robert will be with us soon,’ I said. ‘Anyway, if this was Cluedo, there should be a piece of lead piping on the floor over there. It’s ab
out half the size of the conservatory, if I remember the board correctly, so we wouldn’t miss it.’

  ‘What do you think a place like this costs?’ asked Elsie, changing the subject.

  ‘Millions to buy. Tens of thousands a year to run. Robert says they have a full-time gardener and an assistant, plus a housekeeper and a cleaner who comes in for a few hours every day. That’s before you start repairing the roof or dealing with the death-watch beetle.’

  ‘So, he must have a penny or two then, your banker friend?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  A noise behind us made us turn, but it was not Robert or Annabelle.

  ‘The door was open, so we came in,’ said the man. Annabelle said we’d be having drinks in the conservatory first, so we’ve been hunting for a room that looked like a conservatory or at least had drinks in it.’

  ‘This will do, anyway,’ said the woman, looking round the room.

  ‘Closest we’ve got so far,’ said the man.

  They were both of middle height and nominally dressed for the occasion, he in a slightly scruffy white dinner jacket, she in a long red dress with a black stole draped loosely round her shoulders. Perhaps it was the newcomer’s self-assurance, or perhaps it was the palm trees that surrounded us on all sides, but just for a moment I regretted that I had not thought of wearing a white dinner jacket myself.

  Evening dress makes some people stiff and formal; the man seemed to wear his like an old pair of jeans and a sweater. He still had the air of a naughty schoolboy about him – a naughty schoolboy who has little fear of being caught. Since his hair was showing signs of grey, he’d probably been a naughty schoolboy for some years and was now fairly good at it. He went straight over to the well-stocked side table and uncorked a bottle of sherry. ‘Will this one do?’

  ‘No sign of champagne?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Wouldn’t know where to start looking in this jungle. We don’t know our way round here yet, do we, Fi? We’ll know next time, if they ever invite us back.’

  ‘Probably the champagne will be rubbish anyway. Do you remember the stuff they served up last time in Chelsea?’

  ‘Spanish, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Bulgarian actually. Is that sherry medium dry?’

  ‘It says medium dry on the bottle, but they always lie. Probably tastes like gripe water.’

  ‘Any half-decent white wine?’

  ‘None available to the general public. It’s just the stuff Annabelle has set out on this table.’

  ‘I’ll risk the sherry then,’ she said. I noticed that the black stole had a large cigarette burn in it. She could have turned the stole the other way, but she hadn’t bothered.

  The man poured a large sherry and gave it a quick and not altogether approving sniff before handing it on.

  ‘You two OK for drinks?’ he asked, as he returned to the whisky decanter. ‘No waiting staff tonight it would seem. Sorry – we’re Colin and Fiona McIntosh. Friends of the Munthams, but clearly not such close friends as to rate being met or greeted it would seem. We’re used to it.’

  ‘They’ll be having their usual pre-dinner row,’ said Fiona. She sipped the sherry and pulled a face. ‘Better to get it over with beforehand. You’ll find they’re quite good hosts once they get to focus on you properly. Who are you, by the way? With the state of security here at the moment I guess there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re axe-murders or something. Is that what you are?’

  ‘He prefers poison,’ said Elsie. ‘Though he’s used most methods at some stage.’

  ‘I write crime novels,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Would I have heard of you?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘No,’ I said. (Better to get that one over with too.)

  I introduced myself and Elsie, and we all shook hands the necessary four times.

  ‘You’ve known the Munthams for a while then?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Fiona. ‘In assorted configurations. It was Robert and Harriet, when we first met – and Miles and Annabelle, of course, as a separate but not too thriving operation.’

  ‘Then it was Robert and Madge for a bit,’ said Colin. ‘Not sure what happened to Madge. Probably came to a bad end, like Jonah Jarvis.’

  ‘That was when Annabelle was with . . .’

  ‘Will? David? No, I can’t remember either,’ said Colin. ‘Anyway, we have known them jointly and severally for a while.’

  ‘But nothing changes,’ said Fiona.

  ‘No, nothing changes,’ said Colin. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time Robert had invited us over and then failed to show up at all.’

  As if on cue, Robert burst into the room to greet us, with Annabelle and another slightly dejected-looking guest in tow. Robert apologized profusely but said that he had been talking to Clive (the random dejected guest, I assumed) about business and had not noticed the time. Annabelle did not seem exactly happy, but there was clearly at least a temporary truce.

  I looked at Elsie and realized, with a sinking heart, that she had probably not forgotten that she had been forbidden to address people as ‘Shagger’.

  Elsie held out her hand. She smiled sweetly. ‘Good to meet you, Sh . . . ame we missed you when we arrived.’

  ‘Yes, sorry about that,’ said Robert. He seemed unaware that Elsie’s stutter was a newly acquired disability.

  ‘Well, Sh . . . all we get a chance to view this place later?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Sh . . . uper!’ said Elsie, giving up any pretence of subtlety. She gave me a grin. I glared at her but she had already lost interest in that particular game and was now engaged in a conversation with Colin and Fiona.

  ‘So, what do you do?’ I heard her say.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ I heard Colin reply.

  ‘I meant to say,’ said Annabelle, touching my arm lightly. ‘This is going to be something of a literary gathering. We have another writer coming this evening. Felicity Hooper. Do you know her?’

  There is this charming belief that we writers all know each other – possibly through Society of Authors sherry parties or evenings of debauchery at Hay-on-Wye. I know a lot of crime writers, of course, but for a moment I couldn’t quite place Felicity Hooper.

  ‘What sort of thing does she write?’ I asked.

  ‘Family sagas,’ said Annabelle.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ Not crime at all, and a lot more successful than I have ever been.

  ‘Felicity Hooper?’ asked Fiona, overhearing this last remark. ‘Yes, that’s right, family sagas with an uplifting theme: plucky heroine winning through in the foreground, God playing a minor supporting role in the background. As a man, He’s lucky to get off that lightly. The men in her novels tend to be evil schemers or morons.’

  ‘I know her. She sent a manuscript to me once,’ said Elsie grimly.

  ‘Not literary enough for you?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘Didn’t think I’d make enough money,’ said Elsie, reaching for a peanut from the small bowl on a side table. ‘I was well wrong there. Though I also objected to being lectured to chapter by chapter on the need for courage and cheerful resourcefulness. Stuff that.’

  At which point, I was introduced to Clive, and so I never learned the identity of the ‘stuck-up, sanctimonious cow’ whom Elsie was now discussing with Colin and Fiona. Still, once Elsie got going, it could have been almost anyone.

  Clive seemed slightly distracted – irritated almost – by something that had happened earlier and asked what I did twice without apparently realizing it. The second time he registered my answer sufficiently to reply: ‘I can’t say I read a lot of crime myself.’ Our conversation lapsed into silence several times, but this did not seem to trouble him very much. There were clearly other things on his mind – money perhaps. He had the air of having once been more prosperous than he was now. His dinner jacket was undoubtedly smarter than Colin McIntosh’s, though it too could have benefited from a trip to the dry cleaners. The cuffs of his dress shirt were s
lightly frayed. He proved to be a former banking colleague of Robert’s.

  ‘It was pretty ungrateful of the bank to do that to him,’ said Clive, suddenly breaking one of our conversational pauses.

  ‘I thought Robert had just retired?’ I asked. ‘He said he didn’t want to linger.’

  ‘When they sack you, you get thirty minutes to fill your cardboard box and go,’ said Clive. ‘If you linger they call security.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t look as though he needs to work,’ I said, indicating the grandeur around us.

  ‘I would have thought you needed to work all the more if you had a place like this to keep up,’ said Clive. ‘But the bank may have been more generous with the severance package than I thought. It wasn’t that generous with me.’

  ‘You left at the same time?’

  ‘Pretty much. I’m a school bursar these days, which almost pays the bills. Maybe I should be thankful I’m not still a banker.’

  I grimaced in return. That year bankers were being blamed for everything that was wrong with the economy, and their greed had become the yardstick by which all vices were measured. It was safer that year to admit to having the Black Death than to being a banker.

  ‘Robert thought he knew of one or two good openings for me,’ Clive continued. ‘That’s what we had been talking about.’

  I was trying to think of anything encouraging to say, when all conversation in the room was brought to an abrupt halt.

  ‘So, this is where you all are!’ exclaimed an indignant voice from the doorway. A middle-aged lady in a rather old-fashioned frock of indeterminate colour stood on the threshold, her finger pointing accusingly at Robert – though we all immediately felt a strange sense of guilt.

  ‘Felicity!’ exclaimed Annabelle. ‘How lovely to see you. But was there nobody to let you in?’

  ‘Anyone can come in,’ said Felicity. ‘The place is wide open. But there is nobody to tell you where to go. You could wander the corridors here for ever. You really are the most inconsiderate host, Robert.’