Ten Little Herrings

by L. C. Tyler

  L. C. TYLER

  Ten Little Herrings

  MACMILLAN

  To my parents

  (with apologies for the theft of a name)

  The man in the wilderness said to me,

  ‘How many strawberries grow in the sea?’

  I answered him, as I thought good,

  ‘As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’

  (English nursery rhyme)

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixeen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Prologue

  The only strange thing about my telephone conversation with Ethelred was that he had been dead for almost a year.

  Well, you know how it is. You’re sitting in a dead person’s flat round about midnight. The Sussex rain is chucking itself against the period sash windows. A floorboard creaks, hopefully in one of the adjoining flats. The phone rings. You answer it, as you do, slightly cautiously.

  ‘Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ I said, that being the name of the dead person – though using the word ‘residence’ to represent Ethelred’s poky little flat was perhaps stretching the truth just a touch.

  There was a long pause as if the caller had not been expecting or particularly wanting a reply.

  ‘Zat eez zer residence of Meester Tressider?’ said the caller in what can only be described as a crap accent.

  ‘That was what I meant when I said it was Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ I replied. I found this exchange strangely reassuring in the sense that a phone ringing in a cold, damp, dead-person’s flat in the hush of a rural night was spooky. Finding I had a complete tosser at the other end of the line showed it was just another day at the office.

  ‘Meester Tressider, the famous writer?’

  It was the word ‘famous’ that made me suspicious.

  ‘Who is that?’ I asked.

  There was another long pause indicating that the caller had not quite decided.

  ‘I am sorry to trouble you, madam. It eez British Gaz,’ said the voice, touchingly pleased with itself. ‘I just want to check if Meester Tressider’s thermostat eez set at an appropriate temperature for zer winter.’

  ‘Ethelred?’ I said. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’

  This time the voice did not hesitate.

  ‘No,’ it said. ‘Is British Gaz. Complimentary safety check.’

  ‘At midnight?’

  ‘So sorry, memsahib. It is not midnight at the call centre. In Bangalore we are all working so very hard.’

  Actually (I do know where Bangalore is) it would have been around five a.m., but that wasn’t what gave it away.

  ‘Why has your accent changed from German to Welsh?’ I asked.

  ‘Not Welsh, Indian. In Bangalore we are all so, so Indian. Please can you confirm Mr Tressider’s thermostat has been correctly adjusted for your English winter.’

  ‘Ethelred, stop pissing about,’ I said, on the grounds that one of us needed to come to the point. ‘The thermostat is just fine for a dead person’s flat. If you think you may not be dead, I’ll set it a notch or two higher. Now, you dim tart, where exactly are you?’

  ‘Dead?’ said the voice. There was a note of concern there that was not entirely central-heating related. It was at this point that I remembered that news of his death might not have reached him –something I was going to have to explain to him in due course. And preferably in much more coherent fashion than I am now explaining it to you. Oh . . . and I’d killed him, by the way. Yes, it was going to take some careful explaining at some point.

  Ethelred Tressider, for I was sure that it was he, would have made a better job of telling the story. As an obscure yet experienced crime writer, he knew all about plotting, characterization, pacing and so on and so forth. He would not have had a phone call from a dead person on page one and the accidental revelation of the killer on page two. As an obscure yet experienced crime writer he would still have been carefully setting the scene, explaining who everyone was. He would not have plunged randomly into the story leaving the readers to follow or not as they preferred. And, as an obscure but experienced crime writer, he was going to be pretty pissed off to discover I had killed him.

  An apology was probably called for.

  ‘Ethelred, you dickhead,’ I said, ‘you realize this is entirely your fault?’

  ‘All Mr Tressider’s fault?’ The voice now sounded hurt as well as Welsh.

  ‘Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Where are you, Ethelred? I need to know . . . for certain reasons that I shall explain when I see you.’

  ‘Bangalore,’ said the voice, making one last pathetic attempt to convince itself.

  ‘That’s Bangalore, Cardiganshire?’

  ‘I am not knowing what is Cardiganshire.’

  ‘Nos da,’ I said.

  ‘Nos da,’ said the voice sadly.

  And I hung up. Well, if he wanted to play silly buggers, I’d leave him to stew for a while.

  Of course, the moment I hung up I regretted it. After all, I’d waited almost a year for this call – those strange eleven months since Ethelred had died so tragically and improbably at my hands.

  Now that he was back in contact, I was forced to re-examine my motives for doing what I had done. It wasn’t jealousy exactly. I really am not the jealous type of girl, as you well know. Ethelred was nothing to me and, while I am sure that he lusted after my size 12 (some labels anyway) figure, I was probably nothing to him either. But the fact remained that he had chosen to desert me and fly off to rejoin his Floozy: the Scarlet Woman whose name will never be typed by my fingers. You could argue that all middle-aged writers are entitled to one floozy. But she was the wrong floozy for him. Honestly. It really had been kinder to kill Ethelred there and then.

  A creaking floorboard and another sudden death rattle from the aged sash window brought me back to the here and now. I listened to a series of thumps, then silence reigned again in West Sussex. Was somebody’s dodgy prostate causing them to take a midnight trip to the bathroom? I reminded myself that I did not believe in ghosts, not even ghosts of technically dead crime writers.

  What I needed to do was track Ethelred down and sort all this out. Explain to him in what senses he was dead and, to look on the bright side, in what senses he was alive. Explain to him in which (minor) ways it might be my fault and in which ways it was definitely entirely his fault. Amid all of this confusion, what I had to do was to focus on some hard facts and figures. The figure that immediately came to mind was fifteen per cent (twenty-five per cent film, foreign and translation rights). Yes, that was the one thing that I could be certain of. Whether he was dead or alive, I was still Ethelred’s agent.

  One

  I haven’t always been an agent.

  When I was young, I wanted to be a vet. I liked the idea of looking after creatures with minimal intelligence that needed somebody to sweep up after them. I wanted to spend my time with lower forms of life that were incapable of answering me back. It didn’t take me long to work out my true vocation in life.

  The Elsie Thirkettle Agency q
uickly attracted a number of promising young authors of high literary merit, but I managed to dump most of them. It’s a question of quantity, not quality, you see. The agricultural revolution was all about getting two crops a year out of a field that previously gave you one. It’s much the same with books. The royalties on a book that has taken five years to produce are usually pretty much the same as on one written in six months. I can double-, sometimes treble-, crop my authors. There were a number of laws that I was able to formulate:

  1) Elsie’s First Law – Get the manuscript out of their grubby little hands the moment they hit the required number of words.

  A second draft will be better in some ways but it will certainly be much worse in others. Just send it to a publisher and let the nice editor do the rest. Do by all means check first that it is actually a different plot from the previous book – but see Elsie’s Second Law.

  2) Elsie’s Second Law – Always get them to write a sequel if they know how. After all, they’ve got the characters. They’ve checked out the locations. They’ve hooked a few unwitting punters. It’s true that producing sequels is a sure sign of the second-rate author but, then again, see Elsie’s Third Law.

  3) Elsie’s Third Law – Books by second- or even third-rate authors cost as much as books by first-rate authors. This is odd, when you think about it. It’s a bit like charging the same for mink as for fake nylon fur on the grounds that it’s still a coat. Or charging the same for Lafite as for red plonk. Or charging the same for good and bad chocolate (though, obviously, there is no such thing as bad chocolate). You wouldn’t think you could do it, but see Elsie’s Fourth Law.

  4) Elsie’s Fourth Law – It’s amazing what you can get away with.

  Ethelred was one of my successes. In the early days he hankered after prizes and critical acclaim but, once I had explained things to him properly, I could get at least two, sometimes three or four, books a year under a variety of pen-names. He wrote mainly detective stories but he also wrote romantic fiction. What gave his romances such poignancy was, I think, his long and consistent experience of being dumped by a variety of women, and repeatedly by his (ex-) wife. He deserved better. Not me necessarily, but somebody very much like me.

  Then he hit some sort of mid-life crisis and decided to clear off with the Scarlet Woman (whose name will never etc. etc.) without telling me a thing until he was safely out of the country. It was only right that, some time later, I should have failed to consult him over his death.

  I might have believed he had intended to vanish permanently had he not left painstakingly detailed instructions with me for the maintenance of his boiler while he was away. He was the sort of crime writer who worries a lot about his boiler.

  As his literary agent I was of course not only responsible for his boiler. In his absence, I paid his bills, opened any of his mail that looked interesting, transferred his royalties (less reasonable agency deductions) to his account and checked his bank and credit card statements for any clue as to where he was or what he was doing. Visiting the flat from time to time also enabled me to ensure that everything else was well and to reassure his neighbours that he was still travelling to research his next novel. Very occasionally (because it was a long journey back) I stayed over. Actually it wasn’t really that far back to Hampstead but, when I was in the flat, reassuringly surrounded by his shapeless tweedy jackets, his tatty old Barbour and his green wellies, it was easier to believe that his absence was merely the temporary aberration that I was telling people it was.

  The bank statements and the rest of it, however, pointed to the reverse. Financially he was flat-lining. No indication of life at all. In my case, my credit card statement is one of my vital signs – when it goes blank, you’ll know I’m dead. But Ethelred could survive for months on a bowl of rice and an organic muesli bar. He selected his clothes purely for their durability. It didn’t follow that lack of spending meant it was time to close the case.

  Obviously, it was worth getting him back if at all possible, but there are no handbooks for recovering missing authors – no tips on the Internet. You don’t get ads in the local papers – missing dogs, yes; missing authors, no. It doesn’t seem to be something people want to do that much.

  Then it struck me. He had not needed to use his credit card or cash card so far because he had access to cash from somewhere else. But sooner or later, in my experience, cash runs out. Then he would need plastic. If I waited until the relevant credit card statement came in, I would know where he had used it; but that only meant I could be certain where he was last month. On the other hand if I cancelled all his cards . . .

  I can’t claim it was the work of a moment. Card companies tend to want to speak to the owner of the card, but if you convince them that you’ve just lost somebody’s card that they left with you, and you think the card and PIN number may have fallen into the hands of bad people with expensive tastes, then you can panic them into a bit of action. In twenty minutes Ethelred was, tragically, credit-less.

  I sat back to await another phone call.

  It came within a fortnight.

  In the interim I had been speculating on where Ethelred might be. The Loire valley was where he liked to spend his holidays, staying in hotels with peeling wallpaper, drinking obscure wines and confirming every Frenchman’s prejudice about the Englishman abroad. That, of course, was too obvious to be a real possibility. Clearly he was not in Bangalore. He disliked Benidorm, Corfu or anywhere else that attracted crowds of his fellow countrymen in large numbers. That left most of the rest of the world, which is big. I was still undecided, right up to the moment the call came.

  It was nine in the evening when the tasteful novelty frog phone in my Hampstead flat started singing Greensleeves.

  I silenced the frog in mid-verse by lifting the receiver. ‘Elsie Thirkettle,’ I said.

  ‘Did you cancel my cards?’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘I have no idea. I am not really interested in why you did it. I just asked: did you?’

  ‘You just cleared off and left me,’ I said, mustering some righteous indignation. ‘How was I to know whether you were supposed to be dead or alive? A phone call would have been good. Even a postcard would have been better than nothing.’

  ‘I phoned you two weeks ago.’

  ‘No, that was British Gas. Remember?’

  There was, strangely, no reply to that.

  ‘Why couldn’t you just have the normal sort of mid-life crisis?’ I continued. ‘Why couldn’t you buy a Harley-Davidson, join a heavy-metal band, find religion? Why did it have to involve vanishing without trace? With Her?’

  There was a long sigh. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now I’d like my credit cards back. Please.’

  ‘Where are you exactly, Ethelred?’ I asked.

  There was a pause. ‘Abroad,’ he said with more caution than was really called for.

  ‘In that case, this call must be costing you a bit,’ I said.

  There was another pause. ‘I hadn’t really thought,’ he said.

  ‘Well, think now and get to the point.’

  ‘I need you to get my cards working again.’

  ‘Only you can do that.’

  ‘Great. Who do I phone?’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite that simple?’

  ‘They need you to go into the bank in person to clear one or two things up.’

  ‘One or two things?’

  ‘Let’s say up to about six.’

  ‘Have you done something stupid?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I was lying.

  ‘So what do I do now?’

  ‘If you ever want to use plastic again, you’ll need to come back to England.’

  There was a long sigh. ‘Can you phone my hotel then and pay the bill with your own card so that I can leave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But . . .’
said the card-less person.

  ‘I’m not paying your bill so you can wander off with some floozy,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re hopeless with women. I’m coming to collect you. Where do I have to get a plane to?’

  ‘There are no more women in my life – and certainly no floozies. As for planes, you’ll need to come to Tours, I suppose, if you want to fly. But it’s probably easier to get the train. I’m in the Loire valley – to be exact I’m at the Vieille Auberge in Chaubord. It’s right opposite the chateau. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘Does it happen to have any peeling wallpaper?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the only sort of wallpaper it has.’

  ‘Does it smell of mildew and old cheese?’

  ‘Yes. Both.’

  ‘Is there anywhere else to stay?’

  ‘Quite possibly, but this is where I am staying. I like it.’

  ‘Then book me a room for tomorrow night,’ I said.

  ‘Just one night?’

  ‘I can’t see why we should need to stay longer,’ I said. I figured we needed to stay long enough for me to explain what I had done and for him to understand why it had been for his own good.

  Of course, I had no way of knowing that, in a hotel full of stamp collectors, the guests would suddenly start murdering each other. It’s not the sort of thing you usually plan for, is it?

  Two

  Ethelred met me at the station. He came dressed, for some reason, as the Englishman Abroad. He wore a crumpled linen suit, a crumpled stripy tie and a panama hat. It would have looked eccentric at any time but at a provincial railway station on a cold, rainy December afternoon it attracted many admiring glances.

  ‘Ethelred, you prat,’ I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him on the lower part of both cheeks. ‘Why are you wearing fancy dress?’

  ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he said. ‘You cancelled my cards, remember?’

  ‘You must have other clothes. It’s been too cold for this sort of get-up for months.’

  ‘Not where I’ve been.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘I told you: India.’