Ten Little Herrings

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘You were actually working in a British Gas call centre in Bangalore?’

  ‘I may have made some of it up,’ he conceded, looking over the top of my head. (He’s just a fraction taller than I am.) ‘I was in fact in Goa when I phoned you,’ he added, as if that proved something.

  ‘Good for you,’ I said.

  ‘I have been to Bangalore,’ he added.

  ‘Do you have any idea just how little I care where you went with that tart?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good. So when did you get here?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘A few days ago.’

  ‘Best get you back to Sussex then,’ I said.

  He nodded meekly. ‘What I don’t understand, though,’ he said, ‘is why you keep telling me I’m dead. What exactly have you done, Elsie?’

  I thought of the exploding plane and, for just a second, felt something that was a bit like remorse. I realized that sooner or later I was going to have to own up. I therefore drew myself up to my full height and said: ‘I don’t suppose you know where I could get some chocolate round here, do you?’

  It was, after all, a genuine emergency. I’d forgotten to buy chocolate before leaving St Pancras, and after five hours’ travelling I was starting to get cold sweats, trembling hands and blurred vision.

  ‘There is in fact a chocolaterie in town,’ he said. ‘It’s called Apollinaire. I’m told it’s very good.’

  ‘I’ll drop my bag at the hotel first,’ I said. ‘Then guide me to Apollinaire.’

  Ethelred took my bag, like the gent he is, and we set off on what he claimed was a short walk to the hotel. They had, however, put the town centre on the wrong side of the river from the railway station, and a cold wind was blowing down the Loire. Conversation was minimal until we had crossed the bridge.

  ‘Did you bring any English newspapers with you?’ he eventually asked, the perennial question of the Englishman abroad.

  Actually they had given me one on Eurostar, but I’d dumped it in a bin at the Gare du Nord. Still, I was able to fill him in on the main stories that I thought a crime writer might appreciate.

  ‘There’s been a jewellery robbery in London,’ I said. ‘A big haul of diamonds. Then there was that company that was taken over by that other company – the Russian one? – well, the pension fund is in a complete mess and the pensioners have been left high and dry. I suppose that’s not really crime though? I mean, they’re allowed to do that, aren’t they?’

  I paused. Ethelred just nodded vaguely, meaning either they were or they weren’t or that he couldn’t give a monkey’s.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I went on. ‘There was another good crime story. Somebody is trying to blackmail this fizzy drink company. They say they’ve got the secret recipe for their cola and will publish it on the Internet if the company doesn’t pay up. Sorry – I forgot – you don’t know what the Internet is, do you?’

  Ethelred shrugged again, showing that he did speak some French, and said: ‘Football results?’

  ‘Tottenham Wednesday beat Manchester something . . .’ I said. Or was that cricket? ‘Where is this hotel exactly?’

  ‘We’re almost there. You see those lights ahead of us. Right opposite the chateau. Any news on the literary front?’

  ‘Yes, your last novel was spoken of as a serious contender for the Booker Prize.’

  ‘Was it?’ he said, brightening up.

  ‘As if,’ I said. You‘d think that writers would spot irony, wouldn’t you?

  I racked my brains for anything else that might amuse him. ‘There was something on this ten-kroner puce they’ve discovered.’

  That was an interesting story, in its way, and not without its own little ironies. It concerned a small pink piece of paper with tatty white perforations, originating in Denmark. Until recently there had been only one of these stamps in the world – sold in Denmark some time in the 1850s, when ten kroner would have been enough to post an elephant from Odense to Aarhus and back. They apparently never needed that many of them. Being the only such stamp surviving, it had been worth a bit more than ten kroner. The bad news for its owner was that a collector in Nykøbing had come across two more in his attic. The pink stamp had thus ceased to be part of that exclusive and highly prized club of single-known specimens. On the mere rumour of other stamps of a similar colour and price, its resale value had plummeted overnight – to a paltry million dollars or thereabouts. There were hints that the newly discovered stamps had to be fakes. This was only the beginning of the story, however, because the stamps had then vanished again. The owner had died and the family, who had always regarded Uncle Knud’s interest in philately as a bit of a waste of time and didn’t read the relevant magazines, decided to clear the house before selling it. It was only after Uncle Knud’s heirs had been contacted by a number of solicitous but very interested stamp dealers that they checked the will and remembered a couple of albums and several bags of assorted stamps that they had sold off at a flea market. They could not recall, off hand, whether two of the stamps had been pink, though they rather thought they might have been. The family were, as the saying goes, well gutted.

  Conversely, somebody out there was probably quite pleased, since the stamps had gone for a mere five kroner per bag – scarcely enough to pay the postage on an ivory toothpick travelling from one side of Copenhagen to the other. There was speculation that, if the family discovered exactly who had them, they might try to recover them through the courts–though what their case was, other than their own stupidity, was not immediately apparent.

  Strangely, this one did interest Ethelred in the sense that he let out another of his long sighs. ‘There’s been talk of nothing else at the hotel,’ he said.

  Since we were not in Nykøbing, this was mildly surprising.

  ‘There’s a stamp fair going on at the chateau,’ he explained wearily. ‘Actually it finished today, but most of the people staying at the hotel since I arrived have been stamp collectors or stamp dealers. Occasionally they talk about stamps. At breakfast. At lunch. At dinner. In the lounge. In the bar. In the corridors. I fear for their souls.’

  ‘You can go to hell for talking about stamps?’ I asked.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Ethelred devoutly.

  But the stamp people did not, in fact, only talk about stamps. In the hotel reception I met a nice Russian stamp collector, named Grigory Davidov. He was a little plumper than his doctor might have liked and more than a little pleased with himself – but he did have a very sound knowledge of chocolate.

  ‘Apollinaire!’ he said reverently, having overheard me talking to Ethelred. ‘Whatever you do, make sure you buy some of the peach truffles. They are divine.’ He did a sort of slobbery kissy thing with his fat fingers and his fat lips. I made a mental note to cut down a fraction on chocolate if I ever thought I might be putting on that sort of weight, though I reckon if you’re my build you can carry a few extra pounds without it showing.

  ‘Peach truffles?’ I repeated in reverential tones.

  ‘They are all good, naturally – the fondants, the violet creams, the champagne truffles – but I invariably select a peach truffle from the box first,’ he said. ‘The first chocolate from a full box is a sacred moment, do you not agree?’

  I nodded. This is so true.

  ‘Of course, they are not so good for the figure,’ said Davidov with a throaty chuckle.

  ‘You look well on it,’ I lied.

  ‘With my build I can carry a few extra pounds without it showing,’ he said with a modest smile.

  Call me stupid, but I only bought a small box of assorted truffles to begin with. I’d eaten half of them before I got back to the hotel. And they were indeed very, very good. Still, I could always get some more tomorrow before we checked out.

  And call me a little over-focused on cocoa-based confectionery, but it was not until I had restored chocolate levels in my body that I remembered I had not answered Ethelred’s question. Why did I keep going on about his
death? Yes, I would certainly need to explain.

  But, the way I saw it, that could all wait for a bit. Anyway, plenty of authors were worth more dead than alive. It would be fine.

  Three

  Elsie was right, as always.

  If I was going to have a mid-life crisis, then it might as well have been a conventional one, and my choice of companion had been ill-advised. By the time I phoned Elsie for help I had been humiliated and abandoned. I am, of course, well used to humiliation; the only novelty was experiencing it in India. On reflection, I have to say that humiliation in India felt much the same as it had in Oxford, London and Sussex. It is certainly not worth going there for that purpose alone. Trust me on that.

  And yet it had all started so well a year before.

  With a single bound, or so it seemed to me, I was free. As a writer I have always tried to avoid the more obvious clichés, but that was how it felt as I scurried with my bags away from the short-term car park and towards the terminal building, leaving Elsie in my car, sleeping off the effects of a slightly drugged mug of drinking chocolate. I was free as a person, free as a writer. Elsie had for some time been telling me to get a life. I was simply following her instructions, as I had so many times before. She just hadn’t envisaged my drugging her so that I could make an unimpeded getaway.

  What she did not know, moreover, was that I had been planning this for a while. My airline tickets were in my pocket. I had a wallet full of untraceable cash that would, with luck, keep me going for a while. I had left adequate instructions for the maintenance of my boiler. I was a free spirit at last.

  As I glanced through one of the vast plate-glass windows on my way to the departure lounge, I saw that the sun was rising. It was rising only over Hounslow, admittedly, but it symbolized other dawns in other places, whose names I could as yet only guess at.

  ‘Have a pleasant flight, sir,’ said the young lady as she handed me back my boarding pass.

  ‘You bet your ass, kid,’ I responded.

  And for a while it was good. It really was. I (and my ‘floozy’ as Elsie insists on calling her) wandered barefoot along the dazzlingly white sand of a number of lonely beaches; we watched the burning sunset sky (and, just occasionally, the burning sunrise sky) over pink coral reefs; sometimes we lost ourselves in the contemplation of distant blue hills; sometimes we found strange, abandoned temples, half hidden in the deep shadows of banana groves on the edges of viridian paddy fields. One night we would sleep in creamy, silk sheets at the most expensive hotel in Singapore, an empty champagne bottle resting at the end of the four-poster bed; the next, we would be in a shack on the beach somewhere in Sumatra, with the soft tropical moonlight slanting in through the broken shutters onto our shared mat. Another time, we slept on faded red cushions on the deck of a dhow that we had hired by the day and ate chubby, rose-coloured fish which we had caught on lines and which we barbequed on bleached driftwood on a tiny, rocky island in the Indian Ocean. We ate excellent steak in a rundown eating-house in the red-light district of Jakarta, and casually exchanged views on the painted girls and their clients as they passed through. We travelled by mule along narrow paths and stayed some weeks in a monastery in a hidden valley in the Himalayas, where we woke every morning to tea laced with rancid butter and to the sight of a thin, clean wisp of cloud, streaming off the summit of Annapurna in the bright blue above us. We supplemented the cash I had brought with me with her own more extensive ill-gotten gains. Nothing was planned. Everything was done on a whim. Then, on a whim no doubt, one morning I found myself alone. She had gone and, it appeared, my remaining cash had elected to go with her. For the cash it was going to be a short life, but it would be a happy one.

  I spent the day strolling barefoot along the beach to show myself that I could be a free spirit perfectly well on my own. Later I bought myself a pair of socks. That evening I decided that I had better check that all was well with my boiler in Sussex.

  I had no wish to contact Elsie yet, but it seemed to me that if I phoned my old number and the phone was working then bills were being paid and all was probably well generally. If the phone had been cut off then Elsie had not forgiven me and it was time to fly home and sort out the frozen pipes.

  I tried to work out the time difference between India and West Sussex. I had no wish to wake everyone in the block of flats with the phone ringing in the middle of the night. Unfortunately I miscalculated. Even more unfortunately – and quite inexplicably – it was Elsie who answered the phone.

  ‘Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ she said, in a manner that can be described only as proprietorial. What on earth was she doing there?

  For a moment I was not sure what to say, and then I came up with a brilliant idea.

  ‘Is that the residence of Mr Ethelred Tressider?’ I asked in a cleverly assumed accent.

  ‘That was what I meant when I said it was Ethelred Tressider’s residence,’ said a tired voice at the other end. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘I am sorry to trouble you, madam,’ I said. ‘It is British Gas. I just want to check if Mr Tressider’s thermostat is set at an appropriate temperature for the winter.’

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

  This was obviously a lucky guess on Elsie’s part, but I was having none of it. I told her it was a complimentary safety check.

  ‘At midnight?’

  Midnight? I checked my watch again and recalculated. So, Worthing was behind India then?

  ‘So sorry, memsahib,’ I said, slipping subtly into an Indian accent. ‘It is not midnight at the call centre. Please can you confirm Mr Tressider’s thermostat has been correctly adjusted for the winter?’

  ‘Ethelred, stop pissing about. 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?’ I said. This was news to me. What was Elsie playing at? My plan was to disappear and start a new life. Dying was never intended to be part of it. I wondered if I had misheard.

  ‘Ethelred, you dickhead,’ she said suddenly and inexplicably, ‘you realize this is entirely your fault?’

  For a moment I almost forgot who I wasn’t, but recollected myself sufficiently to say: ‘All Mr Tressider’s fault?’ But I was still trying to work out what other words sounded like ‘dead’.

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

  ‘Bangalore,’ I said. I’d been there recently.

  ‘That’s Bangalore, Cardiganshire?’

  The game was clearly up, but that did not stop me blundering onwards. ‘I am not knowing what is Cardiganshire,’ I said.

  ‘Nos da,’ she said in a voice heavily laden with sarcasm.

  ‘Nos da,’ I replied stupidly.

  And the phone went dead – a bit as I had myself, it would seem. It was clear that Elsie had done something idiotic, but what exactly? If she had had me legally declared dead, then my passport would have been cancelled, so that wasn’t what she meant. Whatever it was, it was clearly worse than that. But what was worse than that? I had no doubt I would find out soon enough.

  I opened the bedroom window and listened for a while to the deafening trill of the cicadas. In the distance I heard the surf washing against the still-warm sand. The humid Indian night caressed my face and I breathed in a smell that was spices and drains in approximately equal measure. I had thought this was my future, but it was starting to look like my past. I closed the window again, switched the air-conditioning up to full blast and, tugging the sheet up over my head, tried to sleep.

  A fortnight later I was in a reasonably priced hotel in the Loire valley and all of my credit cards had been cancelled.

  As mid-life crises go, this one was turning out to be a bit of a disappointment.

  Four

  We were sitting in the hotel resta
urant when Ethelred finished his account of his time in India and elsewhere. It sounded a bit rubbish. I blamed him mostly but (to be fair) I blamed Her mostly as well.

  ‘A postcard would have been nice,’ I reminded him. ‘Or didn’t it bother you that I might have thought you were dead?’

  ‘This thing about my being dead . . .’ he began.

  Sooner or later I was going to have to face up to this one. Now wasn’t a bad time, but I felt sure there would be a better. Yes, indeed.

  ‘And in the meantime who was looking after your boiler?’ I demanded.

  ‘I am of course immensely grateful. Now about my death—’

  ‘Grateful? So you should be. You owe me for a full service, by the way.’

  ‘I assume the royalties are still coming in on my novels,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘You are still selling a few. It’s time you completed another one of your Inspector Fairfax novels. Your publisher is quite keen.’

  Ethelred shook his head.

  ‘They were offering to increase your royalty on the first ten thousand by half a per cent.’

  ‘I’m not doing any more Fairfax,’ he said. ‘I thought I might try something new – a hard-boiled police procedural, set somewhere nobody has used yet.’

  ‘Not Edinburgh, then?’ I said.

  ‘Not Edinburgh. I thought maybe Brighton, and with a younger main character . . .’

  ‘And a taste for Mozart, no doubt.’

  ‘I thought Boccherini, perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Not well enough known,’ I said.

  ‘He’s pretty well known.’

  ‘Not to your readers.’

  ‘Some of my loyal readers will have heard of him.’

  ‘Ethelred, neither of your loyal readers will have heard of him. Mozart’s safer. Trust me.’

  Ethelred wasn’t too happy with this so I asked him (as you do) whether he was working on something at this moment.

  ‘I completed another manuscript just before I left,’ Ethelred said slightly sheepishly.

  ‘Did you?’ I asked. I don’t think my face showed any trace of guilt. It doesn’t usually.