The Herring Seller's Apprentice (19 page)

Even at the time, I suspected that Dennis was bullshitting and knew no more about it than I did, but it sounded convincing.The fact that he was a shady geezer in a flash overcoat gave him a certain amount of credibility in this respect.

‘Tens of thousands of pounds?’

‘Ten thousand, say. But he didn’t do it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What you really want to know is: Did Ethelred hire a contract killer? Right?’

So, actually, Dennis wasn’t so stupid, really.

‘And?’ I said.

‘Most contract killers would use a gun. Some might use a knife. I’ve never heard of one strangling somebody with their bare hands. Why bother? Too slow. Too crude. Too uncertain. To strangle somebody like that would just show a lack of planning. It wasn’t a contract killing.’

‘Well done, Dennis. That’s a weight off my mind, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘Unless they wanted to make it look like a serial killing, of course.’

‘Oh, right.So, I’m back to square one.Thanks a bunch, Den.’

‘Ethelred’s not a killer – either in person or by proxy. I know that and you know it too. Anyway, what’s it to you?’

‘I don’t like losing one of my authors. I’d rather they stayed out of jail.’

‘That’s all there is to it?’

‘Yes, Dennis.That’s all there is to it.’

‘If you say so. He’s a good man.’

‘I know. He always said that he never knew what Geraldine saw in him, but I do. He is a good man. He’s dependable and kind and trustworthy. Of course that sort of thing can get right up your nose. Dependability is something that you only appreciate as you grow older. So I can see why Geraldine might have wanted a break from it but I can equally see why after a few years of Rupert,she might have wanted him back. He’d have gone back to her too, the silly bugger. Geraldine’s death was one of the best breaks Ethelred had.’

‘Just another of your authors then?’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘Thank you for the advice, Dennis,’ I said.

‘Don’t mention it, dear lady’

I went in search of more tea. As I passed the two aunts, I heard one say to the other, ‘But
murdered,
my dear. Surely nobody else in the family has been murdered?’

‘Ivy’said the other.

‘Oh, but that was by her husband – quite a different matter.’

‘I suppose so,’said the second aunt.‘I didn’t see him atthe crematorium, did you?’

‘No, he doesn’t get about much now, poor man.’

I passed on, still tea-less.

Rupert was talking to the vicar. He is the sort of person who knows how to talk to vicars. It’s a gift;either you have it or you don’t. He saw me, disengaged himself from the clergy (an even greater gift in my view) and came across the room.

‘Hello, Elsie.’

‘Hello, Rupert. How are things?’

‘Well, frankly, not too good. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of work around for fund-raising consultants at the moment. Geraldine clearing off with the cash has really finished me off. The landlord’s not too happy at not having his rent paid on the nail. I asked Ethelred if it wasn’t time to go to the police – they might just be able to trace whoever withdrew the money from the bank in Switzerland. He reckons that the other creditors will just swipe it if we do – you know, the banks and people. He says it’s better to track down the cash ourselves. But what if he can’t? I mean … I might have to get a real job.’ He laughed, which under the circumstances could not have been an easy thing to do.‘Ethelred will get the money, though, won’t he?’

Well, I’d seen desperate people before, but nobody so desperate as to pin their last hopes on Ethelred Tressider.

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, sounding more like the kind, reassuring Ethelred Tressider every minute. ‘Of course he will.’

I finally caught up with Ethelred as most of the other guests were leaving.

‘Nice skirt,’ he said.‘New?’

‘A bit tight,’I said, giving it a tug.‘They tried to sell me a size sixteen, but I wasn’t having any of that.’

He nodded sympathetically, but what would he know about how we women are made to suffer?

‘How are things?’ I enquired, the way you do.

‘Geraldine’s estate is almost wrapped up,’ he said. ‘I’ve sold the flat. Completion’s not until the New Year, but everything’s sorted out. Nothing left for me to do – the lawyers will sort out the last bit.’

This struck me as odd, in the sense that up until then he’d insisted on handling everything himself. But if he wanted to take a break and let some solicitor do it, fair enough.

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

There was one of those pregnant pauses, then he suddenly blurted out, ‘Elsie, can you do me a favour?’

‘Maybe,’ I said – though obviously I was going to do it, whatever it was.

‘I’ve got some stuff I want you to look after. It’s in the car.’

The ‘stuff’ proved to be two large boxes.

‘What’s in them?’

He pulled one open. It was full of manuscripts, packed tightly in two piles. On top were the typescript of
All on a Summer’s Day
and a few pages of messy, childish handwriting.

‘All the early ones are there on paper,’ he said. ‘The later ones are on disk.’

I reached into the box and took out the slim handwritten effort.

‘“The Penkwen and the Hedhog?”’ I said.

‘That’s “The Penguin and the Hedgehog”,’ he said, hunching his shoulders and shuffling his flippers a bit.‘It was my first novel. I was six when I wrote it.’

‘I should hope so. Penkwen? I have to point out that there is usually no W in “Once upon a time” either. Who was your editor in those days? OK, I’ll take care of the manuscripts.What’s in the other box?’

‘This and that. I’m trusting you not to peek. I can tell you, however, that at the very top is a letter to be opened in the event of my disappearing and not coming back.’

I felt a cold shiver.What the hell was he on about?

‘Where are you planning to disappear to?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘So why might you not come back?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Ethelred, is somebody threatening you? Is somebody blackmailing you? Look, if they are, Dennis may know what to do. I’ll speak to him if you don’t want to.’

‘Oh, there’s no danger at all,’ he said. ‘Not for me, anyway.’

He smiled confidently, the way he had in the car on the way back down to Sussexjust before the police arrested him.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Whatever you say. And in the meantime,you want me to look after this stuff?’

‘Yes. Until I am able to send you other instructions. Keep it safe and don’t even open the second box unless you need to. Can I trust you?’

‘Ethelred, I don’t understand this and I don’t like it.’

‘Can I trust you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Thanks,you’re a star, Elsie.’

‘I know,’ I said.

At the first layby outside Feldingham I stopped and opened the second box. Well, come on, what would you have done? It contained mainly photograph albums with, tucked away down one side, some pieces of jewellery. I flicked through a couple of the albums.There were old pictures of Ethelred, pictures of Geraldine, one or two of a much younger Rupert and lots of a whole load of people I didn’t know from shit. One album was devoted just to Ethelred and Geraldine’s wedding. I was in one or two myself. Jesus, what did I look like in that lemon frock with half of Kew Gardens attached to my shoulder? (You might not think it now, but I used to have this really crap taste in clothes.) And there was Ethelred, grey morning suit, top hat and a bitch on his left arm, smiling sweetly. Round her neck was a gold chain that was, incidentally, one of the pieces of jewellery tucked away in the box.

On top of all of this was a sealed letter. I looked at it and ran my finger along the top. It would be the work of a moment to tear it open. But then I thought, No, he trusts me not to. How can I yield to temptation within minutes of leaving him? I’ll wait until tomorrow for the letter.

So what was I to make of it all? The pieces of jewellery might technically form part of the estate, but he had probably bought them for her and, in his shoes, I would have tried to claw back some of the cash that she’d walked off with. But the photo albums? Of course, I could understand why he might have seen them as something that was irreplaceable and why he might have wanted them, along with the manuscripts, to be in safekeeping. But why shouldn’t I see them? They were only photos, after all. Or was it a double bluff? He obviously knew that I would open the box and
wanted
me to see the albums. I couldn’t help feeling that I was being presented with clue after clue, but was failing to fit them together. In Rubik’s cube terms, I was back to six sides all looking like rainbows.

I shut the boxes and drove west, back to civilization. The knowledge that the letter lay, still unopened, in the second box gave me a feeling of virtue all the way home.

The public soon lost whatever interest it had had in the murder of Geraldine Tressider. The killing of a little Nigerian boy in south London hit the headlines soon after and stayed there most of that winter. Mary Jones, the sad management consultant, had her brief moment of fame when the police announced that, in the absence of any sighting since her disappearance,they were now treating the case as a murder inquiry. But in view of the absence of a body or anything else, her case too faded from sight as a wet November turned into a wet December and our minds turned to serious problems, like how to keep the diet going over Christmas. I never did find out whether Wayne, Ada or Paula were heard from again. Not everyone who goes missing wants to be found. Geraldine, of course, had not wanted to be found either – only the silly cow overdid it as usual.

For a week or two after the funeral, I saw little of Ethelred. He was busy with various things and I suddenly had my hands full with an auction for Darren’s novel, which resulted in an advance large enough to make the inside pages of the major dailies.Then Ethelred vanished to spend Christmas with some distant relative in Dorset.

It was funny the way that I missed him now when he wasn’t around, but I reckoned I’d see plenty of him in the New Year.

As for me, I spent the festive season alone in Hampstead – not as bad as you might think in that nobody gets drunk and storms out of the house, and you get to watch whatever rubbish on TV takes your fancy. Well, I’d opened my present to myself (chocolate), one from Ethelred (chocolate, bless him) and one from Darren (chocolate), eaten Christmas lunch (microwaved turkey, chocolate, plus half a grapefruit to show the diet I hadn’t forgotten it) and settled back for a mindless six hours of prole-feed on the box, when it occurred to me that there was one little treat that I’d been saving up, to wit, Ethelred’s farewell letter. It was the work of a moment to retrieve it from the box and there it was in my hands, quite unaccountably open.

Oh right. I am, am I?

There then followed detailed instructions for the payment of royalties into his bank account, a list of standing orders that had been set up, what to tell the neighbours, what to do with his car and so on.Three pages in all, and each as dull as the one before it. He’d thought it through like the tax inspector he still was, at heart. Bless. But no instruction to go to the police and tell them the Mob was after him. No instruction even to go to the police and tell them that Geraldine had been ripping off all and sundry. No confession of anything at all.

I suppose my feelings on getting to the end were, as I have so often felt at Christmas,that it had all been something of a let-down. I knew very little now that I didn’t know before, except that Ethelred’s heating system had a seven-day timer and that his car insurance was with the Civil Service Motoring Association, neither of which facts was exactly riveting. But it served to remind me that the core to the mystery – the nature of Ethelred’s Quest – was still unsolved. From the moment he returned from France, nothing he did had really made sense and in spite of my best efforts as a herring seller’s apprentice I really had no better idea now of who had killed Geraldine or what Ethelred had had to do with the business than I had at the start.

Then, in that terrifying, yawning gulf between the Queen’s speech and the earliest you can decently go to bed, I had one of those ideas that I just knew I would end up regretting. France! Yes, of course, that was the line of inquiry that I had overlooked. If I was to understand Ethelred’s actions all that autumn, surely the key to it lay in his trip to France? Was it a coincidence that he was away when Geraldine disappeared, or had it all been planned? Wasn’t the logical conclusion that I should get on over to Châteauneuf-sur-Whatever and
check it out?
Well, I should think so. I looked at the map. There was the choice between an orange
autoroute
heading unerringly south via Paris or an elegant arc along various red
routes nationales
down through the Pas de Calais and Normandy. I instinctively went for the scenic route. It’s amazing how many crap decisions you can make in a single evening if you put your mind to it.

I suppose that I started to have real reservations as I manoeuvred the car off the Shuttle at Calais and noticed that people seemed, for some reason, to be driving on the wrong side of the road. This clearly was not going to be a trip on which I could allow my attention to wander.

I’d timed it all so that I would do most of the drive overnight and have the roads to myself – another of those things that seemed a good idea when I thought of it, but less good now I looked through bleary eyes at the traffic streaming south into the darkness.