Ten Little Herrings

by L. C. Tyler

  In the UK it is relatively rare for either men or women to be shot, though in the United States it is of course routine, seventy per cent of murders being committed with firearms in accordance with the Second Amendment. The right of the people to keep and bear arms ensures that nobody needs to mess around with less efficient methods.

  Poisoning, which as I say is one of my personal favourites, accounts for a surprisingly small number of real-life murders – just four or five per cent, except in bumper years such as 2002–3, when Harold Shipman’s victims skewed the figures just a tad.

  Drownings, which you would imagine would figure reasonably highly, typically make up less than one per cent. If you want to join a really exclusive club, however, then my advice is to get blown up. Murders by explosion are still fairly rare.

  The age of murder victims follows a sinuous curve, with one peak between sixteen and thirty years old. It falls for the over-thirties and then again for the over-fifties. The other peak is not, oddly, the very old, mugged by teenage tearaways for their pension books. The most dangerous year of your life, when you face the greatest risk of murder, is your first. If you’re old enough to read this, then the good news is: the risky bit is already over.

  I am not sure that the Home Office produces statistics for fictional murder. If it did, then a very different pattern would probably emerge. By far the most common way of dying in an Agatha Christie novel, for example, is by poisoning, beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 and ending with Poirot’s Last Case in 1975. Christie’s murderers also seem to be able to get their hands on guns fairly easily. A number of people are pushed abruptly from high places (not a Home Office category). Pretty well nobody gets a good kicking in a dark alley for no reason other than that they looked at somebody the wrong way. Nobody gets knifed just because they suggested somebody else might like to pick up the sweet paper they had just dropped. People are killed deliberately for sound, practical reasons. It’s what we mean by the Golden Age of Crime.

  I don’t know that modern crime writers are much more accurate. Victims die ingeniously and gruesomely, but there is usually still too much planning, too much intent. Most real murders are pointless, accidental, regretted within moments. Christie, it is said, used to write the first draft of her novels as far as the last chapter, then pause and consider who was the least likely murderer before going back and rewriting the book so he or she was the one who did it. It’s a good literary anecdote, but I think she was pulling somebody’s leg, frankly. Still, she was right about one thing. Murderers include the most unlikely people. You’d never spot one in the street. Or in a hotel.

  Thirteen

  ‘You look,’ said the sad remains of Herbert Proctor, ‘as if you have both seen a ghost.’

  He dumped himself down in a vacant chair in between Brown and me. Since he landed with a thump rather than a spectral breeze, we assumed he was less dead than he had immediately appeared. ‘I suppose there’s no sodding free coffee around?’ he added, dispelling the last trace of otherworldliness.

  ‘I take it you know you look like death,’ I said. His face was white and his eyes were hollow. He could have got a job as a corpse on any police drama he’d wanted. Any one at all.

  ‘Look like death? And feel it,’ he said. ‘Bloody doctors.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  He looked a little sheepish and then said: ‘I got a really bad pain in the gut – honestly, really bad. So I said to the receptionist: “Oi, you, Pierre, I think they’ve poisoned me too; you’d better get me out of here sharpish and into hospital. Just so they can keep an eye on me.”’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Yes. In an ambulance with all the lights flashing. They kept me under armed guard the whole time I was there. You’d have thought I was pretending to have gut ache so I could do a runner.’

  ‘And you weren’t?’

  ‘They never gave me the chance, did they?’

  ‘Even so, it doesn’t sound that bad.’

  ‘They only pumped my stomach, didn’t they?’

  ‘Not nice?’

  ‘Try it sometime yourself and then give me your opinion.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘No flipping lunch, then they pump out what little there was in the first place.’

  I told him there might still be free food in the dining room (though it was a bit of a long shot at this stage) and he sloped off still muttering imprecations against the French medical profession.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ asked Brown.

  ‘As escape plans go,’ I said, ‘Herbie’s was crap. He deserved to have his stomach pumped. For me it’s over the wall or nothing.’

  ‘You’d never get away with it,’ said Brown.

  ‘Watch and learn,’ I said.

  The wintry sun had already set over Chaubord. Now the nice concrete was illuminated only by a few random streaks of light from the hotel windows. It was as dark as it needed to be. I headed for the bar and returned clutching the large glass of Jenlain Blonde that formed an essential part of the plan.

  Actually, Brown had long since got cold and bored and had already cleared off to the sitting room when I finally made my break. I had in fact needed to deliver three foaming and completely complimentary beers to the policeman on duty before he started to look uncomfortable and made a quick run for the toilette behind reception. I reckoned that gave me about a minute and a half. I deftly fetched a white plastic garden chair from the heap and then shoved it hard against the wall. That provided just enough height for me to scramble up on top for a brief and exhilarating moment. It was not exactly comfortable perched there and the drop down to the street looked bigger than I had anticipated. But my cause was a noble one and I made a better landing than I hoped, bearing in mind I was not wearing sensible shoes and that my skirt had shrunk a bit at the dry-cleaner’s. I checked my watch – just time to get to Apollinaire before it closed.

  The shop assistant was very sympathetic, and stayed open a few extra minutes while I selected enough truffles to fill their largest box. It is always a pleasure to watch a true artist at work. In front of the plain black dress and severe starched apron, her latex-gloved hands moved rapidly, selecting, transferring and always judging to a millimetre where each precious item should go. Once the last corner was occupied, she carefully closed the box, sealed it with a small red label and tied a gold ribbon around it. I handed her mere money in exchange.

  As I left the shop I realized this was as far as my plan went. I had always been aware I would need to get back into the hotel, but had not given much thought to what came after buying chocolates, and perhaps eating the first two or three, reasoning that it would all sort itself out somehow. As I approached the garden wall, however, I realized that climbing in was going to be a lot more interesting than climbing out. To begin with, I had no step on the outer side, nor had I any way of knowing when the policeman’s attention would be diverted. Possibly the best tactic was to go back to the main street and to breeze in through the neon-lit front door as if I had every right to be wandering the streets. I’m quite good at brazening things out when all else fails. It’s a gift I have.

  While I was pondering the options, I noticed something of more than passing interest. Mr Brown and I were not the only ones with escape plans. A small, shadowy figure was scrambling, with slightly greater agility than I myself had displayed, over the wall. The figure paused for a moment and then jumped, landing softly and cat-like in the shadows at the foot of the wall. It straightened itself to its unimpressive full height, revealing itself to be a weaselly individual of familiar mien. Herbie, in spite of a very empty stomach, was having a second attempt at escape. It seemed he needed very badly to be somewhere else.

  I watched him scuttle along the wall and then, as he reached the lights of the main street, slacken his pace to a more normal walk, before heading off in the direction of the railway station. Naturally, I followed. At first he seemed to be checking from time t
o time whether he was being tailed, but once clear of the hotel he gained confidence and he did not look back until just before he reached the station entrance.

  I had expected him to head straight for the ticket guichet and buy a billet simple to somewhere as distant from Chaubord as he currently needed to be, but he just sailed on past it and towards the left-luggage office. This was a curious escape plan. I tried to get close enough to see what he was doing, but SNCF had put disappointingly little cover around the station behind which an observer might stand and remain unobserved. Herbie was out of sight for a few minutes, but I had the only exit covered, so he at least could not go back into town without my knowing all about it.

  If I was to tail him back to the hotel there was a further procedural difficulty. I was currently (with respect to the town centre) ahead of rather than behind him. He was obviously going to have to walk past me at some point in order to get us back in the right configuration of follower and followee. I therefore managed to backtrack and conceal myself and my chocolates in an unlit bus shelter long enough to watch him start the return journey and to notice that he held what seemed to be a small silvery left-luggage key in one hand. He looked pretty pleased with himself but (without cooperation from SNCF that I wasn’t expecting to get) I didn’t know exactly why.

  On the return leg he was even less cautious than before, though I hung back and made maximum use of any bits of wall, tree, shadow and so on. He still appeared to have the key clutched in his hand as he turned the corner by the hotel for the climb back into the garden. For about sixty seconds he was out of sight in the side street, as I scuttled from my cover behind a billboard. It may be that at this stage I became overconfident in my sleuthing ability, because coming quickly round the corner myself, expecting to see his feet vanishing over the wall, I cannoned straight into him. He was standing back from the wall, possibly trying to resolve the same problem that I had noted myself – that is to say, how to get back in without being arrested for getting out.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, gulping audibly. ‘Out on a little nocturnal ramble, are we?’

  ‘Much the same as you,’ I said. ‘Just a little trip to the chocolate shop.’

  ‘Not just to the chocolate shop. Did you think I didn’t know you were following me?’ he asked patronizingly.

  ‘You didn’t look round,’ I said. ‘Not once all the way back from the station.’

  ‘I didn’t have to,’ he said, tapping his nose. ‘Especially when you seem happy to confirm that’s what you did.’

  ‘Then I hope you had a profitable outing,’ I said.

  ‘Profitable enough,’ he replied.

  I looked to see exactly what sort of key he had in his hand, but it was gone.

  ‘You look puzzled, Elsie,’ he said. ‘Lost something?’

  Then it struck me – if he had something he really wanted to conceal, the best thing would be to swallow the key and have no incriminating evidence at all about his person when he went back over the wall.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t lost anything. I wondered if you had?’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. His Adam’s apple jumped as he gave another quick swallow.

  ‘Sure?’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Then the only puzzle,’ I said, turning to the immediate predicament, ‘is how we get back in. The wall’s pretty high and there’s a policeman inconveniently positioned on the other side. One or both of us is going to get caught.’

  Herbie looked me up and down and then said: ‘I think I know how it can be done. I’ll take a quick peek over the top – I’m a bit taller than you are, see? Then, as soon as the coast is clear, I’ll give you a leg up. Once you’re in and the policeman is looking elsewhere, you can pass the chair over the wall to me and I’ll climb up.’

  Waiting until the policeman would fail to notice me wandering around in the twilight rearranging the garden furniture struck me as a weakness in the scheme, nor was I convinced that Herbie was quite as tall as he thought he was. But it seemed a good plan in the sense that it got me in. That it didn’t get both of us in was not my problem, and if Herbie didn’t realize that I was getting the better of this particular deal, then tant pis.

  After jumping up a couple of times and peering over the wall, Herbie announced in a stage whisper that we had our chance. I quickly placed a foot in his hand and he expertly hauled me up and onto the top of the wall. I jumped into the darkness, taking care to have a firm grip on the precious box. The good news was that my landing was softer than expected.

  The policeman that I found underneath me, however, his face now pressed into the soft but chilly flower bed, was not what you might describe as best pleased.

  I suppose I could have come up with any number of perfectly good reasons for my jumping from the top of the garden wall onto a guardian of the law on a fine winter evening, but none that I could think of seemed even remotely convincing at the time. I smiled sweetly, but the policeman did not seem keen to pass it off as a school-girlish prank as I had hoped he might.

  ‘Ignominious’, therefore, is the only way to describe the manner in which I was led indoors by the policeman and made to describe, to him and to his superior, my evening dash to the chocolate shop. They listened with barely concealed contempt, and I was given a public dressing down in the hotel reception and told never to try anything like that again (which, surprisingly, I had no immediate plans to do).

  ‘Well, at least I have my chocolates,’ I joked as I prepared to make my departure. I had accidentally parted company with them in the flower bed and now looked round to see where they might have been lodged for safekeeping – slightly battered after their collision with a policeman, but yummy all the same.

  ‘I regret to tell you,’ said the inspector, ‘that nobody can be allowed to take anything in or out of the hotel. They are confiscated.’

  ‘Confiscated?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But the peach truffle . . .’ I began.

  ‘That is the end of it, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘You are fortunate not to be charged with a serious crime.’

  ‘But . . .’ I tried not to whimper, but it was difficult. I could put up with incarceration in a hotel with peeling wallpaper. I could put up with a bruising collision with a stationary policeman. I could put up with public humiliation of almost any sort. But no chocolate? Surely the Code Napoléon could not have prescribed anything so harsh and unnatural?

  It was at this point that Herbie sauntered through the door from the garden. He had clearly profited from my own discomfort and made an easy return over the wall himself while everyone’s attention was focused on me – as may well have been his plan all along. It suddenly struck me that somebody who can land like a cat probably doesn’t need to wait for a plastic garden chair to be passed over the wall. I’d been used. He might still have got away with his treachery, but he winked at me conspiratorially as he passed. It was a most ill-advised wink that suggested he thought he was a pretty clever sort of guy. It was a wink that assumed we were in some way still on the same side. It was a most inadvisable wink at a forlorn and chocolate-less literary agent and it was to cost him dearer than he could have ever imagined.

  ‘Just one other thing, inspector,’ I said in a loud voice. ‘That man was out there with me.’

  Herbie froze on the spot. His eyes looked at me imploringly, but it was too late. Oh dear, it was much too late for that.

  ‘You have certainly just come in from the garden, Monsieur Proctor. What exactly were you doing out there?’ asked the inspector with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘I was just sitting out there,’ suggested Herbie with more optimism than was justified.

  ‘C’est vrai?’ These last words were directed by the inspector at the policeman who had been on guard duty.

  ‘Je ne l’ai point vu,’ the policeman replied. Having recently been squashed by a petite but rapidly moving literary
agent, his view of humanity had changed for the worse. He was not inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt unless it was absolutely necessary.

  ‘My colleague does not seem to recall seeing you. So what have you been up to, Monsieur Proctor?’ demanded the inspector.

  ‘You are quite right, Inspector. I did go outside the hotel for a bit,’ Herbie said, fiddling with the zip of his fleece. ‘I felt like an evening stroll, so I . . . just climbed over the wall. I merely had a little walk to the bridge and back to work up an appetite. This good lady will confirm what I say, I’m sure.’ Again the beseeching eyes in my direction, but peach truffles deferred sicken the heart, as Shakespeare once said. There are some things that cannot be forgiven in this life.

  ‘He went to the left-luggage office at the railway station,’ I said. ‘I followed him. He deposited something there in a manner that I can only describe as furtive. You will find the key on him.’

  Herbie, who had been looking at me in horror, suddenly smiled as if I had given him a Get Out of Jail Free card. ‘She’s nuts,’ he said. ‘I might have walked down towards the station but the rest is rubbish. I’ve got no key. Search me all you want.’

  ‘Correction,’ I said. ‘The key is not on him – it’s in him. He has swallowed it.’

  Herbie smiled even more broadly, revealing some unattractive yellow teeth. ‘You won’t find it inside me either.’

  ‘But I am afraid we shall have to try,’ said the inspector. He turned again to the policeman. ‘If you would be so good as to fetch the physician. I think we may need to pump this gentleman’s stomach again.’

  I’ll never forget the look on Herbie Proctor’s face as he was led away. I have no idea what his expression was when, a minute or so later, the gong sounded to announce our delicious (and absolutely free) dinner.

  Fourteen

  It had been a funny sort of day.

  After tea, I had retired to the small brown sitting room to think things through, leaving Elsie to make her own way (as I later learned) to the garden.