Ten Little Herrings

by L. C. Tyler

  I needed to get some air, but the only place to go was the hotel’s small garden.

  I found Ethelred already on the terrace there, drinking a coffee. He looked a little more pleased with himself than was good for him, but otherwise all was in order. Possibly he was just relieved that his interview with the police was over.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked.

  He was in the process of lifting his cup to his lips and now smiled at me across the frothy black liquid.

  ‘It can’t have gone that well,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if you were ever a suspect. At the best, we’re both free to leave before lunch.’

  ‘I thought we might stay an extra night,’ he said.

  ‘OK, but why here?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well – number one,’ I said, running through the obvious, as you often have to do with writers, ‘it’s a dump. It will probably be an empty dump by tonight if they let us go. Number two . . . actually, number one is plenty, Ethelred. It’s a dump.’ If I’d been planning a tryst with Jonathan Gold, I might have come up with some lame excuse for staying on. Who was Ethelred planning a tryst with?

  Ethelred made some pretence of considering my arguments. ‘No point in having the inconvenience of packing and unpacking,’ he said. ‘This is fine.’

  ‘Fine? This is one of the worst hotels I have been in.’

  ‘Anyway, I think I might make it a setting for my next novel,’ he added, improbably.

  ‘Then get your Moleskine notebook out and start scribbling. And do it fast. We’re checking out at the very first opportunity.’

  ‘I need,’ said Ethelred, possibly telling the truth at last, ‘at least to have a brief discussion with Grigory Davidov before we leave.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t stand him? You described him as rich and unpleasant.’

  ‘I said that’s how some people would describe him.’

  ‘So his friends just describe him as comfortably off and unpleasant?’

  ‘Possibly. He’s not the richest oligarch around by a long way. Even so, there’s something important I need to ask him about.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just something he told me that I wanted to follow up.’

  ‘Well, you’d better move fast on that too,’ I said, ‘before the police arrest him. He has to be the prime suspect.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because – duh – he and Jonathan Gold obviously did not like each other. Don’t you think he’s got to be the murderer?’

  ‘The probability is that it was somebody from outside the hotel, and this business of holding us all here is totally unnecessary.’

  ‘If Davidov wasn’t the murderer then, at least, he and Gold were obviously cooking up something together.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So in that case,’ I said, ‘what if Mr Davidov knows who the murderer is?’

  ‘I think that is very unlikely.’

  ‘In one of your novels,’ I said, ‘the fact that somebody knew who the murderer was would mean that he was in imminent danger himself. He’d be the next one to snuff it.’

  ‘Quite the contrary. That’s not one of the clichés that I have ever used,’ said Ethelred disdainfully.

  Our conversation was interrupted by the French police sergeant, who had slipped out onto the terrace unnoticed by either of us. He bowed to me.

  ‘Good morning, madame,’ he said.

  ‘Are we free to go?’ I asked.

  ‘Unfortunately, you will be here for a little longer,’ he said apologetically. ‘I regret to inform you that there has been a second death.’

  He paused, waiting for the inevitable question.

  ‘A second death?’ asked Ethelred. Well, somebody had to or we’d be there all day.

  ‘Mr Davidov has . . . died.’

  ‘Meaning murdered?’ I asked.

  ‘A heart attack,’ said the sergeant, though he did not sound convinced.

  ‘That was bad luck,’ said Ethelred, ‘but, if that is the case, there should be no need to detain us.’

  ‘Until we are certain of the cause of death, we must treat it as being suspicious,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘In other words, he’s been murdered because he knew too much,’ I said.

  As a literary agent you get a feel for these things.

  Seven

  If I had observed that the atmosphere had been muted during the morning, it was only because I had no idea how bad things would be by lunch-time. Maybe it was because the sun was shining and we couldn’t go outside, other than into the rather sad little garden at the back of the hotel. Maybe it was because two of us had been murdered (heart attack? do me a favour) and the murderer was possibly still in our midst. For whatever reason, there was a collective depression that hung almost visibly over the dining room.

  At our own little table, Ethelred was scowling and monosyllabic. He seemed to have taken Grigory Davidov’s death as a personal affront. At the next table the two German children were complaining (in German) that they were bored. I tried to make out some of what they were saying but, never having done even O-level German, I could not understand a word. On the other hand anyone who has ever been around kids – and I do try hard not to be – would have immediately been able to recognize the whiny tone of the jaded infant. The fair-haired bloke in the crumpled suit, striped shirt and no tie had his map open in front of him, as though that would speed him on his way (strangely, it didn’t). The two tweedy philatelists were silent and disgruntled.

  The weasel was absent, presumably in his lair.

  ‘The police will want to question us all again,’ I said.

  ‘Especially you,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Me? Since when was I any sort of suspect?’

  ‘I didn’t say you were, but your room is undeniably next to Davidov’s.’

  ‘Is it?’

  I hadn’t really noticed who was in which room, though I had the weasel’s room number. Mine was at the end of a corridor and so, thinking about it, adjoined Davidov’s and no other. There was, I suddenly remembered, a connecting door in one wall of my room to permit speedy access between the two. My flesh crept, but only briefly, because the door had, after all, been firmly locked – I’d checked that. It might, however, explain why I had heard various noises as clearly as I had – because the door offered (slightly) less soundproofing than a hotel wall. Davidov had certainly been restless last night – or somebody in his room had been.

  I surveyed the dining room again while I mulled all of this over. It was full of lots of ordinary people with ordinary worries about missed connections and fractious offspring.

  I had another dip into Ethelred’s chocolate fondue (he was in no state to appreciate it) and then raised a question that had been troubling me. ‘If it was one of the other hotel guests who murdered Davidov and Gold, which of us was it?’

  Ethelred looked round the room without much interest.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘There’s nobody here who looks vaguely capable of one murder, let alone two.’

  ‘But it could, as I have said, be somebody from outside the hotel,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘For the first murder, yes. But by the time Grigory Davidov died, the hotel had been sealed off. Nobody – guests or staff – could come or go.’

  ‘So, a member of the hotel staff then. The chef would have had plenty of access to knives.’

  That the chef might have taken a dislike to us all was not a happy thought. Still, I took another dip in Ethelred’s chocolate fondue – some risks are worth taking.

  ‘The chef? Do you think so?’ I asked, licking my fingers.

  ‘Not really. On the face of it, it is improbable that the hotel would contain two guests who had annoyed the staff enough that they should kill them both. One possibly, but not two. In the case of Jonathan Gold, most of the staff are in the clear anyway. As I think I mentioned, there were almost no staff on duty last night. The receptionist was the only one who was around th
e whole time, but he has apparently worked for the hotel for years and is not known to have any murderous tendencies. The hotel manager lives in, but as it happens was visiting friends in Tours; his car broke down and he and his wife were obliged to stay there until this morning. All of the other staff – including the chef – live in the town somewhere and were absent at the critical time. When Davidov died, conversely, almost everyone was here. The odd thing about the second murder, though, is that it was committed in a hotel swarming with policemen. Not good timing, unless it was very necessary and you were very desperate. So, it’s a bit of a puzzle. On the other hand, I’m only a crime writer. You’d be better asking the police what they think.’

  ‘But, if you are saying that the murders are connected,’ I said, ‘then you are also saying it has to be one of the guests. But why should anyone murder two people as different and unrelated as Davidov and Gold?’

  ‘Of course, we still don’t know for certain that Davidov’s death was murder,’ said the practical Ethelred. ‘The police said it could be a heart attack.’

  ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they? We need to find out what Gold and Davidov had in common.’

  ‘As you say, very little,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Mr Davidov had lost his valuable envelope,’ I continued. ‘The one that was in the safe. That has to be a clue, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Ah yes, the envelope,’ said Ethelred. ‘The police mentioned that.’

  ‘No, I mentioned that,’ I said. ‘I saw Davidov arguing with the receptionist. I actually told you about it at breakfast, but as usual you weren’t listening. Grigory Davidov had left an envelope in the hotel safe. When he checked the envelope this morning it was empty. He claimed whatever was in it had been stolen. The receptionist said that it must always have been empty.’

  This made Ethelred very thoughtful.

  ‘So you saw him? You saw the envelope? How large was it?’ he asked.

  ‘A4? No, more like A5, perhaps. Bigger than a normal letter anyway – maybe padded? I didn’t see it up close. Davidov was in the process of handing it back to the receptionist. The receptionist didn’t want it. What was amusing was that—’

  ‘So, this valuable thing must have been quite small?’ interrupted Ethelred.

  ‘Well, not enormous. I assumed it must be stamps – this being a stamp fair and so on. What else is small and valuable? Gemstones? Large-denomination banknotes? Very very small works of art? A blackmail letter? Money makes sense – money to buy something that somebody here had . . . or . . .’ My list trailed to a sad and anticlimactic close.

  Ethelred said nothing.

  ‘Maybe,’ I continued, having had a comforting thought, ‘Davidov and Gold were both, independently, trying to get hold of the same thing, and somebody else was trying to stop them both – even if it meant killing Davidov with half the French police force watching. That would be good in the sense that the rest of us, at least, have nothing at all to worry about, eh?’

  I looked at Ethelred. For some reason, his face had gone quite white.

  Eight

  I like to plan my novels in some detail.

  I once met another crime writer who claimed to produce plans that were longer than the actual books. This seemed excessive, but perfectly possible. It’s all about the small stuff. Though the reader should see nothing but unexpected twists and turns, as the writer you need a clear map showing the path through the maze, including many byways that neither you nor the readers will ever visit.

  Ta ke Ginger McVitie, for example, a personal favourite amongst my fictional villains. As the reader, you will gather he’s been in and out of half the jails in the country, and that’s all you need to know. But, as the writer, I need to be familiar with exactly where and when and for what, otherwise I shall drop into my next novel the ‘fact’ that he was in Pentonville in 1992, and then some observant crime aficionado will be writing in to say that he was clearly there at the same time as Bruiser Beecham, so why didn’t they recognize each other during the Buckford NatWest job in 1994? I sometimes have pages and pages of biographical notes for even the most minor characters. You may be able to breeze light-heartedly through horror stories, but you can’t do crime superficially.

  That’s what makes it difficult for me to work with people who scarcely plan at all, as I was having to now. Of course, I had some idea what was required of me when I had arrived in France, but my instructions were (shall we say?) sketchy. It would have been helpful to have known who I was to meet up with and what it was that I was to collect. Little details of that sort. Davidov and Gold both looked, with hindsight, likely candidates as my ‘contact’, but neither had approached me and both were now inconveniently dead. If it had been either of them, I might as well go home as soon as we were released.

  I had, as I had told the police, spoken only briefly to Gold, albeit on several occasions. With hindsight perhaps I should have had my suspicions about Gold’s philatelic credentials from the start. In a hotel where stamps seemed the sole subject of conversation, he was the only one of the few guests who never mentioned them.

  Davidov, conversely, seemed to be a genuine enthusiast, only too willing to lecture me on his large and expensive collection. ‘An entire room in my dacha is devoted to stamps,’ he said. ‘It is my escape from the pressures of running so many successful businesses. I have many specimens dating to the time of the Czars. Of communism, I do not care to collect. But stamp collecting is a most egalitarian pastime, no? To collect classic cars – as I also do, by the way – takes money. To buy yachts costs money. But anyone can start a stamp collection with a few pennies, and anyone with a little knowledge will soon start to find bargains. I myself have found many bargains. Many.’

  Then there was the weaselly Mr Herbert Proctor. ‘Call me Herbie,’ he’d said when we first ran into each other, advancing a damp palm in my direction. ‘What should I call you?’

  ‘You call me Mr Tressider,’ I had replied.

  I cannot say why I didn’t like him. I have no idea at all whether he liked me. Probably not. But, though he looked as if he might have the capacity to bear grudges, he also appeared to lack the courage to do much about it. However frequently I snubbed him, he would bob up again, undeterred, with the same half-ingratiating, half-mocking smile. Though he had a knack of suddenly appearing in the chair next to mine, he gave no indication that he and I were supposed to be working together. I hoped we were not.

  I initially wrote him off as just another stamp collector. What gave him away was that he talked about the same stamps over and over again, as if he had read a couple of articles before he left for France and was relying on those and those alone to see him through the next few days. It didn’t bother me in the sense that one stamp was pretty much like another and I’d done exactly the same thing to cover my own tracks. He was actually one of the more interesting people at the stamp fair. It just happened that I didn’t like him. Not a bit.

  The nice family did not in any sense match my idea of what my contact would look like, though (as I was beginning to realize) that did not mean they were not the people I was supposed to meet up with. I chatted a bit to them in English and in their own language, but mainly in English. He was a diplomat and they were taking the opportunity for a short holiday in the country they had just been posted to. They were, as far as I could see, exactly who and what they claimed to be.

  The fair-haired man was named Brown. He was in France on business – which was not in any way stamp-related. He was driving back to England and had stopped over at the hotel for one night. I had spoken to him only briefly before Elsie arrived. He was probably now regretting not pushing on to Caen yesterday evening. He appeared to have pitched up totally by chance.

  And the point was that my contact was to make himself or herself known to me during the course of the stamp fair. I was, for some reason, not to make the approach myself, even if I guessed who it was. Nobody had approached me, however, and nobody looked likely to.

&n
bsp; What hadn’t occurred to me, until Elsie kindly suggested it, was that there was any risk in this at all. Now it seemed to me that there might be quite a lot of risk. And I didn’t even know what I was taking the risk for.

  So, you could say, it was all a bit of a mess, even before Elsie had thoughtfully cancelled my credit cards.

  I do hate it when people just give you part of the story. Don’t you?

  Nine

  There’s not much you can do in a room without chocolate.

  I’d been interviewed again by the police, which provided me with a little entertainment. Now I was sitting on my hotel bed, literally kicking my heels. I wondered whether to go and chat to the policeman outside. He was not, of course, guarding my door, but guarding the door to (the late and probably murdered) Mr Davidov’s room to prevent anyone entering and tampering with the evidence.

  I looked again at the connecting door and wondered how nervous I would have been if I had known Davidov was on the other side. Less nervous maybe than if it had been Herbie Proctor.

  I wandered over to the door, turned the handle and gave it an experimental push. No, it was definitely locked. Then equally experimentally I tried my hotel door key in the lock and (what do you know?) the lock turned smoothly and it swung open to reveal . . . another door. So much for that then. Each room had, independently, its own connecting door operated by the same key as the door that led to the corridor outside. The keys to both rooms were thus needed to get them to interconnect, as and when interconnecting rooms were required.

  I was shutting my own door again, when I noticed that the second, apparently closed, door moved slightly as I did so. Not only wasn’t it locked, it wasn’t even shut properly. Possibly Davidov had been interested to see where his door went, or possibly the police had opened it speculatively when they were searching the room. Whoever it was, by kindly leaving the second door unlocked, they had just provided me with a way of enlivening an otherwise dull afternoon. With more than mild curiosity, I gave Davidov’s door the lightest of touches. It swung open, silently and invitingly, and I stepped across the threshold.