Ten Little Herrings

by L. C. Tyler

  My own thoughts were not encouraging. That I had been abandoned by a certain party, I now did not doubt. What was unclear was whether the intention had always been to send me on a fool’s errand or whether a plausible scheme had been dropped in mid-course without anyone thinking to inform me. Over the past twenty-four hours it had become apparent that all that was left was for me to return to Sussex (or Goa) and await instructions, if any. I was not particularly optimistic that any instructions would be forthcoming.

  One of the two remaining bona fide philatelists wandered in apologetically and took the furthest seat from me. I had been introduced to him early on and knew his name was Taylor and his companion was Jones – but that was about all I knew. For a while I had thought of them as Taylor-and-Jones: inseparable and largely indistinguishable. Both were middle-aged. Both wore tweed jackets. Both had lost more hair than they had managed to retain. It was only slowly that they had emerged as individuals, much as twins lose their ability to confuse you as you get to know them better and learn which has the small scar, which the slightly more rounded cheeks. Taylor, I now realized, was the younger of the two by a good ten years and his remaining hair was black rather than grey. Though he may well have patronized the same clothes shops as Jones, his eye was brighter, his jacket was newer, his trousers better pressed, his tie had pretensions to being more than a grubby length of knitted wool from a charity shop. In time, age and misfortune might well turn him into Jones, but for the moment he was still Taylor.

  I nodded to him and he nodded back. He sat down in front of a heap of ancient French and English magazines. He picked up and discarded each of them in quick succession and then looked resignedly in my direction. Though we were two strangers, we would just have to talk to each other.

  ‘Nothing to your taste?’ I asked, making the first move.

  ‘Nothing I can concentrate on,’ said Taylor. His hand ran through some dark strands of hair and then into the pink trackless waste beyond. Ten years too late, he attempted to smooth the tresses on top of his head. ‘Like most people here I should have been back at work by now,’ he added.

  ‘I suppose I’m lucky in the sense that I can work anywhere,’ I said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I said.

  ‘Would I have heard of you?’

  ‘Almost certainly not,’ I said. I told him the three pen-names under which I write. As usually happens under these circumstances, the encouraging smile slowly faded into blank indifference.

  ‘So what sort of thing do you write?’ Ta ylor asked, though now with no great display of interest.

  ‘Detective stories mainly,’ I said apologetically. ‘Maybe not your sort of thing?’

  ‘No, I’m very keen on crime. I read it a lot – Rankin, Grafton, Leonard, Dexter. I just haven’t heard of you,’ he said.

  I nodded. It was at least honest.

  I expected him to change the subject at this point, but he suddenly looked at me with revived interest.

  ‘So, you’ll know all about poisons and so on?’ he asked.

  This was true. As I say, I know all about poisons, at least theoretically. It’s not difficult to gain a superficial knowledge of most things.

  ‘A bit,’ I said. ‘My readers expect me to know things like that.’

  ‘And how to use them?’

  I got the impression I was being interrogated, but was unsure why.

  ‘That’s the point of poison – in detective stories, anyway. You use it.’

  ‘You’d know the right dose and everything?’

  Yes, this was an interrogation all right. I dearly hoped that Taylor did not see himself in the role of amateur detective.

  ‘I don’t murder people in real life,’ I said, clarifying exactly what I did. ‘It is frequently tempting, but in my books the villains always get caught and are duly punished. Perfect crimes are rare.’

  ‘What about Jack the Ripper?’

  ‘There are exceptions, obviously.’

  There was a pause during which I of course had to ask what he did. It’s pretty unavoidable. Frankly, I had him down as a chemist.

  ‘You might not guess by looking at me, but I’m a chemist,’ he said confidentially. ‘I work in the soft drinks industry.’

  Well, that gave us (including deceased hotel guests) a chemist, a pharmacist and a drug company rep. So it wasn’t just the crime writer who might have a knowledge of poisons.

  Taylor told me who he worked for. I admitted that the name vaguely rang a bell.

  ‘Yes, we were in the news recently,’ he said despondently. ‘Somebody was threatening to reveal the formula of our bestselling drink. Of course, any idiot with a toy chemistry set could buy a bottle and analyse it. It’s scarcely top secret. But we’ve made a thing for years about the formula being kept in a locked safe, so we’ll look pretty stupid when it’s out there for all to see. We’ll also look pretty stupid when it’s revealed that the secret ingredients are lemon juice, aniseed, caramel syrup and one or two other things you can buy in the supermarket.’

  ‘So what will your people do?’

  ‘Well, I’m just a humble chemist,’ he said, ‘so I doubt they’ll be consulting me. Bearing in mind sales of hundreds of millions of pounds a year are involved, they may well decide to buy them off. But once stuff like that is out, it’s out, isn’t it? Short of discreetly murdering these people, there’s probably not much we can do.’

  He paused, aware that threats of assassination were probably in bad taste under the circumstances.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest the company . . . or I . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘As you say, villains always get caught . . .’

  ‘In my books anyway,’ I said.

  It was just starting to get dark outside, when he left and (almost immediately) Mr Proctor put in a brief appearance. I had heard that his ‘poisoning’ had been a little exaggerated – but he looked ill, as he well might after his treatment.

  ‘Where’s tea?’ he demanded.

  ‘They cleared it all away ten minutes ago,’ I said.

  He looked very disappointed.

  ‘I’m sure you could get room service,’ I said.

  ‘And they’d charge for that?’

  ‘Possibly. I doubt that it would be exorbitantly expensive.’

  He considered this briefly. ‘I might get myself some chocolate.’

  ‘I don’t think the hotel has any,’ I said.

  ‘The shops have.’

  ‘But you can’t go out, you know.’

  He smiled. ‘Herbie Proctor has his methods.’

  Only later did I learn that the methods would involve scaling a wall and being pursued on a winter evening by a short, fat literary agent. That was all still in the future and would be related to me over dinner by the agent in question.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said, not realizing quite how much luck he was going to need.

  ‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it,’ he replied with a chortle. ‘It’s all about knowledge and skill. You’ll see.’

  On my way back to my room, I noticed Elsie carefully carrying a large glass of beer into the garden. But she was too intent on not spilling a single drop to notice me. Yes, it was a funny sort of day.

  It was only when I was passing through reception some time later and saw a slightly muddy and bedraggled Elsie being marched in by a red-faced policeman that I discovered how much fun everyone else had been having that evening.

  If only a message had been left at reception telling me what on earth I was supposed to be doing in Chaubord in the first place, I could have settled back and enjoyed another pleasant evening in the Loire valley. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.

  Fifteen

  The news that Herbie Proctor was having his stomach pumped for the second time in one day seemed somehow to cheer everyone up. Hints had also been dropped that this stage of the investigation was almost complete and that we cou
ld all check out some time the following morning. Conversation over dinner was lively. Amongst the small group that was left, there was quite a party mood.

  Only Ethelred still seemed quite glum.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We could be out of here by tomorrow.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’ asked Ethelred.

  ‘The police have questioned everyone,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But arrested nobody,’ he said. ‘If there’s even a chance that the murderer is amongst us then I don’t see how they can let anyone go. Within a few hours everyone here would be out of the country, with the possible exception of the Pedersens, who can probably claim diplomatic immunity anyway.’

  ‘How long can you be detained here without charge?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Days? Weeks? Look what happened to the Count of Monte Cristo.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘the sooner they arrest somebody the better.’

  There was a cough behind me. It was the nice policeman who I had jumped on earlier.

  ‘Mademoiselle Thirkettle,’ he said – rather formally, I thought, for somebody who I had been so close to –‘I regret to inform you that we need to ask you some more questions.’

  ‘I was about to order dessert,’ I said.

  ‘I am afraid this cannot wait.’

  ‘You’ll have to arrest me to keep me away from the profiteroles,’ I joked.

  ‘That was my intention,’ he said. ‘I think it would be better if you accompanied me without further fuss.’

  * * *

  The police had taken over one of the back offices, an untidy room made untidier by the numerous half-finished mugs of coffee and dirty plates that had accumulated there. I was offered the less well-padded of the two chairs in the room. The inspector took the comfy one. He seemed friendlier than the policeman, possibly because I had not recently landed on top of him, forcing his face into the freezing flower bed.

  ‘Mademoiselle Thirkettle,’ he said, ‘I think you may not have been entirely truthful with us.’

  He paused, leaving me to wonder which of the lies I had told recently he was referring to. Since he would have no idea what an English size 10 looked like, it was improbable that he would be picking me up on that. Maybe it was the one about never having gone into Grigory Davidov’s room? Hmm, I’d just have to wait and see. In the interim, I tried the same sweet smile that I had tried in the flower bed.

  ‘Could you tell me, for example, why we found your fingerprints in Monsieur Davidov’s room?’ asked the inspector.

  The answer to the question was of course that I thought they must have already dusted for fingerprints well before I went in there, otherwise I might have been a bit more careful. They’d fingerprinted all of the hotel guests earlier so it would not have taken them long to work out who had been eating whose chocolate.

  ‘I just thought I’d take a look round,’ I said. It didn’t sound any more convincing when I said it than it does written down. At the best I sounded like some sort of peeping Tom. At the worst I was the poison queen of Chaubord sur Loire. Obviously one of these was marginally better than the other.

  ‘A look round?’ he said, spitting the words out one by one. Clearly, in his view, poisoners ranked slightly above peeping Toms.

  ‘The door just sort of came open,’ I said, trying hard not to sound either weird or criminal this time. ‘After I’d unlocked it, that is. So I sort of wandered in to look for chocolate and ended up going through his dressing gown pockets . . . I’m not explaining this very well, am I?’

  ‘We are of course aware that you took away the box of chocolate truffles, because we recovered it from your room. Why did you take them?’

  ‘You can’t search my room just like that.’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  Fair enough.

  ‘Well, what do you think anyone would want to do with a box of chocolates?’ I said.

  If I could just pause for a moment and give you some advice – never try irony on British traffic wardens, US immigration officials or French policemen. For some reason, none of them get it. None of them.

  The inspector did not smile. ‘And you ate them all?’

  ‘Every last one. Is that a crime?’

  ‘It did not occur to you that this might be dangerous?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Not at that moment in time. It did occur to me shortly before I sicked up in the bushes, but not when I was actually eating them. Unfortunately.’

  ‘At least, Mademoiselle Thirkettle, you have saved us checking whether the others were also poisoned. We could regard that as a service to the French state perhaps.’

  ‘Do I get the Legion of Honour?’

  ‘No,’ he said. (See above comments on irony.)

  ‘Did you handle the box?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘A lot?’

  ‘There was a lot of chocolate.’

  ‘That would explain,’ he said, ‘why the only fingerprints we can identify on the box are yours.’

  He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked at me.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked, hopefully.

  ‘No, that isn’t it,’ he said. ‘Did you go into Monsieur Davidov’s room at any other time?’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Somebody suggested that you might have done.’

  ‘Do you mean Herbie Proctor?’ I asked. The light suddenly dawned.

  ‘Of course, we would have checked the room for your fingerprints anyway,’ he said.

  Yes, daylight dawned, but it was a nasty, creepy, grey dawn.

  ‘The filthy, lying toerag!’ I observed calmly.

  ‘On the contrary, our informant was absolutely on the nose, as you say.’

  ‘It’s just because I grassed him up about the key . . .’ I began.

  ‘Grassed up? You mean . . .?’

  ‘Told you he had the key.’

  ‘Ah, and that is grassed up. I shall make a note. You are assuming, of course, that our informant was indeed Monsieur Proctor,’ said the inspector. ‘By the way, he had not swallowed a key.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. We X-rayed his stomach in the hospital. No metal objects of any kind.’

  ‘Well, he’s a very suspicious character for all that,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you try pumping his stomach just one more time?’

  The inspector smiled. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Shame,’ I said. ‘But he did have a key.’

  ‘He says not.’

  ‘What you have to do,’ I said, ‘is to search all of the left-luggage lockers for the thing he has hidden there.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘So – I am curious to find this out – how will we know when we find it?’

  ‘It will be a suspicious object,’ I said.

  ‘Did you see him carrying anything with him on the way to the station?’

  I thought back to his cat-like leap from the wall. A bag would have been very noticeable. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but—’

  ‘So, this is just a guess on your part?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but—’

  ‘Mademoiselle Thirkettle,’ he said, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes, ‘you seem determined to cast suspicion upon yourself in every possible way. In future, please stay out of police investigations. Please, do not try to climb the garden wall – and certainly not in that skirt. Please do not make accusations against your fellow guests unless you have something remotely resembling evidence. Please do not eat or otherwise interfere with any evidence. And, above all, please do not jump on any of my police officers. They do not like it; it makes them feel uncomfortable. Is that clear?’

  I wondered if I should tell him how sexy he looked when he narrowed his eyes like that, but I just said demurely: ‘But of course, Monsieur Inspector.’

  ‘In fact, just stay completely out of the way until we tell you that you can go.’

  ‘
Am I under arrest?’

  ‘You are very fortunate not to be.’

  ‘Am I free to return to the dining room?’

  ‘Or to any other room, except the room of the late Monsieur Davidov.’

  I sprinted back down the corridor, but met Ethelred and the others as they were leaving their tables.

  ‘You missed some great profiteroles,’ said Ethelred.

  ‘Are there any left?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Ethelred. ‘They’ve just stopped serving.’

  ‘I had seconds,’ observed one of the Danish children gleefully. He was saved from justifiable infanticide only by one thing. Herbie Proctor was just behind me. He looked a bit like a famine relief advertisement, but not so deserving.

  ‘Any food left?’ he asked desperately.

  I smiled. Sometimes it’s those small, simple things that can really make your day.

  Sixeen

  Stabbing somebody to death is easier than you would think. Agatha Christie complicates things a little in Murder on the Orient Express by having some of the victim’s wounds as mere scratches, that being the most the perpetrator could manage. A stab wound does not, in fact, require a great deal of force. Once the knife has penetrated the skin, surprisingly little effort is required to make a deep wound.

  Wounds can, however, be remarkably variable. The shape of the weapon will affect the shape of the wound, and the wound from a double-edged knife is often said to be very different from that of a single-edged knife. The blunt side of a knife can, however, split the skin in a way that looks very much like a cut from a sharp edge, so you shouldn’t believe everything you read. Much depends, too, on whether the cut is in the direction of Langer’s lines or perpendicular to them. Those parallel to Langer’s lines will usually be slit-like – those at right angles will gape open.

  The size of the wound will be increased if the knife is rocked or twisted in the wound. The latter is referred to in the street parlance of South London as a ‘juke’.

  One peculiarity of knife wounds is that they can actually be longer than the weapon inflicting them. This is because of the compression of the skin and underlying tissue as the blow is struck. Conversely, the width of a stab wound is usually less than the width of the knife because the skin will contract around the wound. A superficial examination of a stab wound can therefore sometimes be misleading.