The Herring Seller's Apprentice (22 page)

The policeman notices neither reaction. He wishes to catch nobody’s eye for the moment. ‘We immediately assumed that it was your wife,’ he says. ‘But we do need you to confirm the identification.’

‘I see,’ said the gentleman.

‘So, you are able to identify the body, sir? I understand that it’s been some time …’

‘I would know my wife anywhere, officer,’ says the gentleman quickly and firmly. (It is true, he would – though, as it happens, this is not she.)

‘You’ve no doubt about that?’

‘None at all.’ (This too is true – he is certain that, if he ever saw his wife, he would know her. Anywhere.)

The young constable breathes a sigh of relief. ‘We are very grateful to you for identifying the body, sir. I realize that you and she have been divorced for some time. We might have asked her sister, but she does live some way away and it would have been …’

‘Very distressing for her?’

‘Exactly, sir. Very distressing.’

The conversation continues for a short time, then, at the young constable’s suggestion, they leave, and the sound of their voices fades away down the long corridor. The lights in the room are switched off and Mary is left alone again, as she was for so much of her life. Some time later she is cremated under the name of Geraldine Tressider, but that is to jump ahead in our tale.

OK so far, Elsie? Are you beginning to feel sleepy? I’m not surprised with all the driving you’ve done over the past few days. Tip back the seat if you like, you’ll be more comfortable. Just listen to me droning on and to the hypnotic swish of the windscreen wipers. That’s right. Close your eyes if you like.

So, who next? I think it must be time for Ethelred Tressider. You may remember him too? A hack writer of no importance. Three hack writers, to be precise. Let’s tell his story.

At what point did I realize that I was turning into my father, I wonder? There was no sudden revelation on the road to Damascus. For a long time, in fact, I truly believed that I was doing what I had always wished to do and had the respect and, up to a point, admiration of my peers. I wanted to be a writer and that was what I was. It was only over the years, as the prizes failed to come in, as the reviews (good or bad) became shorter and less frequent, as even the local bookshops stopped inviting me to sign books, that I gradually became aware of ambitions that would never be fulfilled: aware that there are … well … writers and writers. On a good day, Elsie, I obviously blamed you for luring me from the straight-and-narrow path of true literature in pursuit of a modest but comfortable income. But on a bad day, I knew that I had nobody to blame but myself. Like my father I was living a mere caricature of the career that I had intended, becoming more and more ridiculous as the years went by: a strange stooped figure, whom the village children would advise to get a life, since it was so obvious that I did not have one. It is said, Elsie, that Cardinal Newman, having left the Church of England and met with nothing but reverses in the Church of Rome, was one day found silently weeping outside the church at Littlemore, where he had in happier times been the incumbent. I never returned to bestow my tears on the railings of the tax office, but I would sometimes wonder whether I might by now have been a senior inspector of taxes and I would note, with a strange fascination, each civil service pay increase.

I suppose that I might have continued, almost indefinitely, prodding an increasingly reluctant Fairfax into action once a year, alternating this with a tale from the ever-fascinating world of oral and maxillofacial surgery. Master Thomas would have investigated the strange death of Richard II, and perhaps entered the service of the House of Lancaster. The wily and untrustworthy Henry IV would have had a use for him. He might not have been too old perhaps to accompany Henry V to Agincourt in some capacity. For him, unlike Fairfax and me, all sorts of opportunities beckoned.

Slowly, I began to form a plan. I would
break free.
One day I would simply vanish, taking with me nothing but my laptop computer and a change of clothes. I would starve in a garret and write a masterpiece. So what stopped me, Elsie? The practicalities of it all, I suppose. Of course, it was an attractive idea: walking out one early summer morning, the misty sun just a finger’s breadth above the horizon, with nothing but a knapsack and the dusty open road ahead. But I would leave behind a tangle of unpaid bills, mortgages and standing orders. There would be books that I would miss, pictures, photographs – all becoming damp and mildewed in an empty flat. I wanted to flee and become a different person, but the person that I was said I couldn’t go.

Then Geraldine came back. She arrived on my doorstep quite suddenly one morning and announced that we were going to have lunch together. That I might have anything better to do would not have occurred to her. She knew that there was nothing better to do than have lunch with her on a fine spring morning.

And suddenly I was eighteen again.

She never explained why she had come back, she never apologized for any minor inconvenience she might have caused me in the past – that would have been totally unlike her. In fact she began, over that first lunch, to describe her latest project, suggesting casually that I might like to invest several hundred thousand in it. When I said that I did not have hundreds, let alone hundreds of thousands, to spare, she burst out laughing and said that that was as well, because I would never have seen the money again. She then described how she planned to milk a number of mugs of whatever she could get, before fleeing the country and her accumulated debts. It was an amazing act of trust, under the circumstances. It was one of her random moves, and she sat back to see whether I would take her queen or resign the game. But, of course, she knew which I would do.

I told her that I had also thought of vanishing without trace, and ran through the photograph-album aspects of it. I had expected her to mock me, but she became serious and agreed that this would be difficult. Unless one had an accomplice to sort out that sort of thing, I said. We both looked at each other and I knew that I had just been recruited as an accomplice. And I didn’t mind. It was like being back at school, and finding that you had just been picked for the first eleven. It was like your publisher phoning you up and telling you that you had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was better than both: I had been picked as Geraldine’s friend.

We didn’t sleep together – not that time anyway. But halfway through lunch she suddenly asked me, ‘Are you wondering whether I still wear black underwear?’ I denied it, and may have even blushed. She laughed and said, ‘Well, you’ll have to use your own initiative to find out the answer to that one, won’t you?’

When she left for London she kissed me on the cheek – a simple act but one that seemed to promise an infinite range of future favours. The last trace of her perfume seemed to linger about me for the rest of the day. Any reservations that I might have retained vanished. I was seduced.

And on later visits … well, like Amanda Collins, I’ll just have to leave you to fill in the details for yourself. She does still favour black underwear, by the way.

Most of that spring and summer we worked on the plan, adding elements here, refining details there. A great deal of time was spent on agreeing where Geraldine would flee to. I concurred that Brazil might be suitable. I raised only minor doubts over Bolivia. It was only when we started discussing Belgium, Botswana, Burma and Bhutan, that I realized that Geraldine’s approach remained alarmingly random. At a very early stage it was agreed that, having covered up her disappearance, I would come out and join her and we would sit admiring the Andes (or Himalayas or Ardennes) and I would write my masterpiece. We debated for some time whether she should slip away quietly and unobtrusively (my plan) or whether there should be a more dramatic display with suicide notes and piles of clothes left discarded on a remote beach (Geraldine’s plan). This small detail was unfortunately never entirely resolved – to my satisfaction anyway.

But in the meantime, we set about constructing a new identity for Geraldine. Obtaining a passport in the name of somebody who died as a baby – a real person with a real identity but no further use for a passport themselves – was my little contribution as a novelist. It is a well-known device from detective fiction. Indeed, so well known is it that checks are now carried out by the Passport Office using parish records. As a result a cottage industry has grown up, stealing parish records to prevent such investigations. And of course, as Charlotte told you, the parish records had, quite coincidentally, been stolen from the church in which Pamela Hamilton-Boswell is buried. Pamela’s history was well known to Geraldine. As long as nobody had already used her, we were safe. They hadn’t. The passport came through and ‘Pamela’ vanished off to Switzerland for a couple of days to open a bank account.

Geraldine refused to let me have anything at all to do with the matter of raising capital, other than to promise that she would steal only from people who she was sure could afford it and that I would not like. That she chose Rupert, Smith and her sister Charlotte was, in a funny sort of way, her apology for walking out on me. She was offering me a chance of revenge on those who had mocked, reviled or otherwise incommoded me all those years ago. All very
Count of Monte Cristo,
eh, Elsie? What she overlooked of course was the fact that, whenever I read that book, I always feel sorry for Baron Danglars and the others long before the Count has completed their ruin. I did try, but I have to admit that I took relatively little pleasure from the discomfort of my erstwhile enemies – except Smith, perhaps, once or twice. But Geraldine did it for me, and I appreciated the kind thought.

We agreed that it was essential that as little suspicion should fall on me as possible, and I therefore arranged to be out of the country on the day she was to vanish. The night before her departure, even though I had agreed not to contact her at all, I phoned her from my hotel. I just needed to hear her voice. It was a mistake. Inevitably we argued. She had decided to go for the dramatic gesture: a suicide to be faked in much enjoyable detail, including a car abandoned on a remote beach. I pointed out the inadvisability of drawing the attention of the police to her disappearance before she had had a chance to ensure that she and the money were completely untraceable. She said that I always spoilt people’s fun, and we inevitably began to rake up much past history, in the way people do when they have a lot of past history to rake up. She hung up on me. I phoned her back. The answering machine had been switched on. She was uncontactable.

I reassured myself that this was only a temporary tiff. She would phone me in England, from Bolivia or Bhutan or Belgium. But no call came, only a policeman to announce her disappearance.

You were right about my reactions. Of course, I showed no surprise at all when he announced that her car had been found abandoned: I never doubted that she would press ahead with some idiotic scheme. But I had assumed that the plan had been to leave behind her own car, not a hire car … and above all it would be left well away from Sussex to avoid any hint of involvement on my part. Clearly she had made an extra few thousand on the sale of the Saab, but at what risk to the credibility of her disappearance? Then there was the ridiculous ‘suicide’ note. Of course I saw, even from the photocopy, that she had used a sheet of my writing paper, and I wondered what on earth she was playing at. Was she getting back at me for the phone call? Was it some sort of joke? Or were these more of her random moves, just to see what might happen? Or was it a straight double-cross?

The more I thought about it, the more likely the double-cross looked. After all, she was prepared to deceive Rupert, Smith the bank manager, Charlotte and goodness knows who else. Why not me too? Her claim to be exacting some sort of revenge on my behalf looked with hindsight more like a way of salving her own conscience as she defrauded people of their cash. Yet even in my darkest moments, I never quite lost faith in her – soon she would phone me and all would be well.

Then came the news that a body had been found. As I drove to the police station I was quite confident that the police had made a mistake but then, just for a moment, in that white room I really did think that it was her. The short fair hair and the freckled face gave much more than just a superficial resemblance. Had I not seen her for ten years, I might have actually believed that it was Geraldine lying there. So certain were the police that they had found her that I was already relishing the prospect of telling them how wrong they were. But another thought entirely occurred to me. If they wanted to believe that this was Geraldine, why not let them, at least for a while? After all, I could always claim later to have been quite reasonably mistaken. There would be no question of a continuing search and Geraldine would gain valuable days to withdraw the money and get to wherever it was she was going. I didn’t lie. I simply let them believe what they wanted to believe. That’s all I did.

Once the initial elation of my success had faded, a leaden weight slowly began to descend on my shoulders as I realized the many complications that this small act might now lead to. You see, if this wasn’t Geraldine, then it was clearly somebody else, and it was only reasonable to assume that people would be looking for her. There might be friends. There might be anxious relatives. Since this was a murder, there was undoubtedly a murderer. I began to regret my subterfuge, but I could scarcely go back and say that I was no longer sure about the identification of the body and that I wanted a second look. At times I hoped that the police would of their own accord revisit the identity of the victim. But once I knew that the body must be Mary’s – and that there were no grieving friends or relatives – I decided that perhaps I could leave things as they were a little longer.

So why was my deception never uncovered? Simple. When Mary Jones’s body was found, nobody was looking for Mary Jones, only for Geraldine Tressider. The location and description were almost perfect. Why then should anyone want to doubt my identification? Later, when Mary Jones was finally reported missing, the police were looking for a lady with long mousy-coloured hair in the Bournemouth area. Why should they look again at the identification of a blonde lady found near Worthing and already confirmed as Geraldine Tressider? Of course, dental records would have shown them that they were wrong, but Geraldine’s phobia about dentists meant that there were no dental records available for G. Tressider. Fingerprints and even DNA (I have no doubt) would have also indicated that something was amiss, but Geraldine had no fingerprints on record and I doubt that DNA tests would have been contemplated for a body that could be identified so quickly and easily. Still, it will not surprise you that I wanted to have that body cremated as soon as possible.