The Herring in the Library Page 5

  ‘Whisky, please, Annabelle,’ he simpered. There was a real and present danger that he was going to roll over on the floor to have his tummy tickled.

  She used the drink order as an excuse to manhandle him again. ‘You boys and your whisky’ she said, giving his arm an affectionate squeeze.

  Drinks were served while Annabelle apologized for Shagger’s absence and I offered a little helpful advice on interior decoration. She took it well, I thought. When she had gone, I offered Ethelred advice of a more general nature.

  ‘Could you get your eyes to stop following her every movement like some lovesick puppy? 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,’ he said.

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

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

  Of course, Ethelred’s problem was that he’d been married to Geraldine for years, without discovering anything important about her–like the names and addresses of her various lovers, for example.

  This took us onto the subject of Mr and Mrs Shagger (as Ethelred was keen I should not address them). I’ve given up trying to work out why people end up married to other people, other than to guess that it’s done by some rather vindictive random number generator. Based on my other friends, they were no more unlikely a combination than most and, to be fair, at that point my knowledge of Shagger himself was limited to what Ethelred had told me. But why would any sensible man hitch up with a blatant gold-digger, ten years younger than himself, with long legs and a surgically enhanced chest? If I ever meet a sensible man, I’m going to ask him, but in the meantime it will have to remain a mystery.

  It was round about that point that Colin and Fiona McIntosh arrived. I have to say that I took an instant liking to them. Neither of them looked as though they had spent more than five minutes getting ready for the evening’s bash – including locating the dinner jacket at the bottom of the wardrobe and the dress trousers (for all I know) in the garden shed. They rubbished their hosts’ champagne, confirming my suspicions, and then helped themselves to anything liquid they could find in the largest glasses on the premises. They were good people, though they too did not quite match my image of Sir Shagger Muntham, the eminent financier, and his circle.

  Fortunately Shagger himself now made an appearance. My immediate impression was of somebody who had spent many years dining well and might now have an inkling that the bill was on its way. He was tall, a bit like Ethelred; but (though I wasn’t planning to tell any crime writers this) he looked about ten years older than Ethelred, which didn’t quite fit with their being drinking buddies at university. Either Shagger had been an old undergraduate, or he’d packed in a few extra years somehow since graduating. He also seemed to have lost weight, but not in a good way. His evening dress – smart enough in other respects, with impeccable creases in the trousers – just seemed a touch loose on him. His cheeks were just a trifle sunken. He was just a bit listless. I don’t know if you read much poetry but, frankly, if you had put him beside a lake from which the sedge had recently withered, he’d have been a dead ringer for Keats’s palely loitering knight-at-arms-and – that guy as you’ll be aware, was deeply in the shit. No, Shagger didn’t look a well man. Maybe it was simply that Mrs Shagger had put him on a diet. I’ve sometimes thought I might like to lose the odd pound or two myself, but not at that sort of cost.

  He had with him (other than his wife, who did not look happy) a rather hunky individual named Clive. Though his hair was distinctly thinning, he still had more than a little youthful charm. Clive remained somewhat in the background as we all introduced ourselves.

  I remembered that I was not to address Sir Robert as ‘Shagger’. ‘Good to meet you,’ I said. ‘Shame we missed you when we arrived.’

  ‘Yes, sorry about that,’ said Shagger.

  I asked whether we would get a chance to look round the joint later. Shagger thought we might, though he was not to know under what circumstances and roughly how dead he would be at the time.

  I said I thought that would be super.

  I turned to Colin and Fiona and established he was a doctor – Shagger’s own doctor, as it happened.

  ‘He doesn’t look well to me,’ I said.

  Colin smiled, as if to say that wasn’t something he could discuss with a total stranger, which (or are doctors taught how to double bluff?) probably meant it was pretty damned serious.

  Fiona turned out to be a surgeon, making them one of these all-medical couples that you run into from time to time.

  Then a familiar name was mentioned off to my right.

  ‘Felicity Hooper?’ asked Fiona, overhearing the same remark.

  Ah, yes, I thought, Felicity Hooper – successful novelist but not represented by me in anyway, shape or form. Years ago I had sent her a brief letter to let her know that, much though I loved the manuscript that she had chosen to share with me, I did not feel able to devote sufficient time at present to placing her novel and that possibly she might be better represented by some other etc. etc. etc. The reason I remembered Hooper was that she was one of those people who fail to spot an outright rejection and write back to explain why you and they are soulmates. It was on the fourth attempt that I finally shook her off, by which time I was explaining myself much more clearly. I’m told that one of her later books featured an obnoxious midget literary agent called Elise. Fair enough: it’s a crap name, as I’ve already said.

  The McIntoshes had never read any of Felicity Hooper’s books. I proceeded to rubbish them, even though I’d only read the first half of the first one. As an agent you are permitted to do this.

  I was just getting nicely into my stride when we were interrupted. ‘So, this is where you all are!’ exclaimed a frumpy individual standing by the door. Not everyone has my dress sense, of course, but this dame had either gone to her mother’s wardrobe by mistake or thought that this was a fancy dress party. I sniffed the air but unexpectedly could not detect the odour of mothballs. I could have given her a few helpful tips on the fashion front. In spite of her blatant lack of dress sense the party seemed cowed rather than amused – possibly because it had taken no more than ten seconds for her to make it clear she looked down on everyone in the room. It was interesting to see how Mrs Shagger immediately sucked up to her. ‘Felicity! How lovely to see you,’ she said. (She did not speak for most of us in this respect.)

  So, this was Felicity Hooper, then. The newcomer at this point launched into a general tirade about other people’s bad manners, not greeting people at the door, lack of security, allowing terrorists to roam unchecked around the conservatory, hall and library, where we could all be murdered with daggers, ropes, lead piping etc.

  Shagger shut her up with gin (it’s not just babies you can feed it to) and her complaints were reduced by a few decibels. Annabelle then grabbed her firmly and disposed of her by introducing her to Ethelred – a mean trick, but I’d have done the same. I saw him grimace and heard him politely enquire after her sales figures.

  ‘So, do you live round here?’ I asked the McIntoshes, who had refilled their glasses fairly lavishly under cover of Hooper’s entrance.

  ‘No, we drove down from Clapham,’ said Colin. ‘This is our first visit to Findon. The invitation came a bit out of the blue, really. We were supposed to be at a College of Surgeons’ dinner tonight, but we thought it would be more fun to see Robert pretending to be lord of the manor.’

  ‘They fill your glass a bit more often at the RCS,’ muttered Fiona.

  ‘Say what you like about surgeons,’ said Colin, ‘but they do still know how to drink.’

  ‘So did Robert before he married her,’ said Fiona. ‘I hope Robert’s looking after the wine at dinner – both in terms of the quality and the quantity.’

  ‘Do you think he’s got any money left for wine after buying this place?’ asked Colin.

  It was at this point
that the last couple arrived. In the ensuing introductions, and reshuffling of the pack of guests, I found myself back with Ethelred and La Hooper. She was complaining about crime in general.

  ‘It merely shows,’ she said, ‘what a ridiculous genre crime is. It is exactly like Cluedo. Six or seven stock suspects, all with a motive and, strangely, an opportunity. Then you put them all together in a country house somewhere, with a convenient excuse as to why the police cannot investigate the murder themselves.’

  That is, obviously, fair comment, but not the sort of thing you should say to a crime writer, unless you are their agent and contractually obliged to be ruthlessly honest. Hooper was being unpleasant on a purely amateur basis, which I rather resented. I suddenly realized who it would be good to see murdered tonight, though the chances of it actually happening were quite slim.

  Ethelred in the meantime was defending crime writers in general. He wasn’t making too good a job of it, so I introduced myself, just to see if La Hooper remembered me.

  ‘Elsie Thirkettle. Literary agent. I turned down your first book. It was crap.’ Well, that should give her a clue.

  Then they did this gong thing to tell us dinner was ready in some remote corner of the house. And, each with our own thoughts on the evening so far, we all set off on our expedition to find the dining room.

  Annabelle had sat me next to Robert at one end of the table. Ethelred was at the far end, next to the gold-digger herself. ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced yet,’ I said to the man on my left, as soup was randomly allocated to guests by the village idiot in a borrowed jacket.

  My neighbour was giving his full attention to protecting his trousers but he found time to reply: ‘Gerald Smith. Blast.’

  I offered him my napkin to mop up some of the soup that was now such a noticeable feature of his evening wear. He dabbed silently at his cuff for a bit and then glanced quickly up the table to check that the soup man was not on his way back. Gerald didn’t look like somebody who could take a joke, especially one that entailed being served soup by a comedy waiter. So it wasn’t really his sort of evening.

  ‘I’m Robert’s solicitor,’ Gerald said eventually. ‘And you are . . .’

  ‘Elsie Thirkettle,’ I said. ‘Agent to the writer of fine but underrated literature seated at the other end of the table and currently talking to your wife.’

  ‘She’ll be filling him in on Scott, no doubt,’ said Gerald, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Sir Walter?’

  ‘No, our son Scott. He’s just eighteen months.’

  ‘And doubtless has his father’s nose, his mother’s eyes and soon.’ I’m not really into juveniles, but I know that this is what parents like to hear – doubtless it reassures the fathers no end.

  ‘It would be surprising if he had,’ said Gerald. ‘He’s adopted, you see. Jane wasn’t able . . . we weren’t able to have children of our own. So, in the end, we adopted. Scott.’

  I nodded. I’ve never quite seen the point of children, so it is doubly a mystery to me why anyone should want to introduce a completely unrelated humanoid into their household to crap on the Axminster, but each to his (or her) own.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, trying to appear sincere.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. But he too didn’t seem as sure as he should have been, and the conversation lapsed once again.

  I checked out the other end of the table, where Ethelred was paying rather too much attention to his hostess’s reconstructed frontage. She leaned forwards in a way that seemed to me to go beyond mere flirtation.

  ‘Are they very big?’ I heard Ethelred ask.

  It seemed an unnecessary question.

  ‘Bloody good wine,’ I heard Colin say.

  I turned to see Shagger putting a finger to his lips. Annabelle presumably was unaware of this particular extravagance. Shagger noticed my glance and gave me a wink before calling the village idiot over for a whispered conversation.

  Reluctantly I turned my attention back to Gerald. ‘Is Jane a solicitor too?’

  ‘No, she’s a full-time mother,’ he said. Again, did I detect a lack of enthusiasm for this career choice? ‘She used to work in a bank.’

  ‘Like Robert?’

  ‘Same bank. She used to be Robert’s secretary.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  I finally caught Ethelred’s eye and he turned immediately to the less dangerous charms of Jane Smith.

  ‘We’ve got a very good gardener, here,’ said Shagger, over to my right, as though he had suddenly been reminded of the fact. ‘Acres of gardens of course. You need somebody full-time. He’s called John O’Brian. I don’t know where Annabelle found him, but she reckons he’s very good.’

  ‘Is that the guy I saw earlier?’ I asked. ‘Lots of muscle, not much shirt, good firm bum?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shagger. Like Gerald Smith, he seemed to harbour some secret sorrow this evening. ‘Yes, that’s the chappie.’

  ‘Do you do much gardening yourself?’

  ‘No, I leave that to John. Annabelle spends a certain amount of time overseeing John’s work. She has a lot of fun in the garden, she tells me. Are you all right?’

  Some of my soup had gone down the wrong way. Gerald patted me on the back.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, but changed the subject away from gardening to avoid any repeat performance. Obviously, if I employed somebody like John O’Brian, I wouldn’t have wasted him on mulching the rose bushes either, but I suspected Annabelle might be in breach of the Working Time Directive.

  I looked across the table at Clive Brent, who in turn was casting furtive glances in Annabelle’s direction. She caught his eye once and then frowned and turned away. What was that all about? Robert was fortunately now deep in conversation with Fiona McIntosh, but the air, frankly, was getting electric with intrigue and suppressed desire.

  We were well into the various courses when Robert stood up and tapped a glass for silence.

  I don’t know what sort of speech the others were expecting. Most of the party was, by this stage, fairly drunk, the wine having flowed more freely than Colin had predicted. There had been a brief and almost imperceptible contretemps between Mr and Mrs Shagger, when the village idiot had produced a big, cobwebby bottle of red and Mrs S had waved him away, only for Mr S to wave him back again. This obviously confused the village idiot, who had stood there, not unlike Balaam’s Ass, until Shagger took the heavy bottle from him by force and went round the table pouring drinks. Mrs S ostentatiously declined. Anyway, having stuck to lemonade, I was probably the only member of the party who was entirely sober when Robert scraped back his chair and began to address us.

  He explained that he and the gold-digger intended this as some sort of house-warming and that we were a specially selected group of chums. I wondered briefly whether Shagger had slept with all the women and his wife with all the men – but that would have ruled me (and Ethelred) out, so possibly not. I got the impression he might be drunk enough not to hold back on little details of that sort, so I continued to listen with interest.

  ‘Will there be fireworks?’ asked Clive.

  ‘Fireworks? Of a sort, maybe. For the moment, however, I merely wish to drink the health of everyone here round the table.’

  So, nine of us drank each other’s health in wine, one in lemonade. Robert burbled on a bit longer and then, quite abruptly, took his leave.

  I’d had a chance to watch Annabelle’s face during all of this, and it had changed from mild puzzlement to genuine concern. Whatever Robert had in mind, she had not been let in on it. On the other hand he might have just gone to the loo. It was reaching the stage in the evening when a number of bladders were realizing that they were not as young as they once had been.

  We talked amongst ourselves for a bit. Annabelle left and came back. Felicity was the next to depart, and returned complaining that the facilities were almost impossible to find. Gerald and Jane made a family outing of the same trip, which also took some time. They came
back separately, having mislaid each other in the labyrinthine corridors of Muntham Court. In the meantime Fiona McIntosh had also excused herself.

  A good fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes had elapsed when Mrs Shagger’s patience finally wore out and she suggested that, since Robert had deserted us, we should take the opportunity of touring the ground floor with her to admire the various treasures, and so on and so forth, that Muntham Court had to offer.

  Everyone decided to go except Ethelred, who seemed to have had a row of some sort with Felicity Hooper. So I stayed back with him and the others departed. Annabelle went with the Smiths and Felicity Hooper, then Clive Brent drifted out on his own, followed by the McIntoshes, each clutching a glass.

  Ethelred was morose and untalkative. I was wondering whether I shouldn’t after all go for a wander round, when I noticed John O’Brian, wheeling his now-empty barrow in the very last of the fading light, back to wherever barrows get put when darkness falls. He disappeared round a hedge and was, sadly, lost to sight.

  I was just wondering how soon I could get Ethelred to drive me home, when Annabelle returned and announced Shagger had kicked the bucket.

  Fair enough. It was only later that things started to get really interesting.

  Five

  So, then there was one.

  Annabelle had whisked Ethelred off with her, leaving me alone at the table. Since all the action was clearly going on elsewhere, I wandered out into the corridor.

  The weird thing was that people were obviously rushing around in a blind panic elsewhere, but here all was silence and calm. I could hear the ticking of a large clock somewhere nearby, but that was all. I decided to go left, but all of the oak panelling looked much the same. I wasn’t sure if I was heading for the front door or the kitchen. Like I say, it was a reasonably big house.

  Then I turned a corner and collided with Clive Brent, who was hurrying in the opposite direction.