Crooked Herring

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Oh, and who was Janet off to see?’ I asked.

  ‘Elisabeth Söderling,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. So, she’s in England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not in Sweden?’

  ‘No. She’s been over here a couple of days. She’s signing books at Foyles this afternoon.’

  ‘How long will she be at Foyles?’

  ‘Until six. Janet has another meeting afterwards, though, if you were hoping to catch her.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how helpful you’ve been.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  From the journal of Elsie Thirkettle

  I hung around outside Foyles until about six-fifteen. I watched Janet Francis leave, looking at her sparkly watch and hobble off down the road. She’s too old for skirts that are that tight and has, I regret to say, put on a bit of weight since I saw her last. I hid in a doorway as she passed. It wasn’t that I was planning to do anything illegal or unethical, but I still didn’t want Janet to stop me doing it.

  I could see Elisabeth Söderling standing just inside the door, saying her goodbyes to the Foyles staff. I waited until she had left and set off down Tottenham Court Road, then stepped out smartly from my hiding place, waving a book I happened to have in my handbag. ‘Miss Söderling!’ I called.

  She turned and, doubtless thinking I was a fan after a signature, stood there in a resigned sort of way.

  ‘I was just leaving …’ she said, half-apology, half-justifiable irritation that she’d spent an hour in the place and I’d waited until now.

  ‘Could I have a quick word with you?’ I asked.

  She looked down at the book and noticed it was one of Peter James’s. It was (to be fair) a well-regarded police procedural, which had been on the best-seller list for several weeks and sold a few hundred thousand. But sadly it wasn’t one of hers.

  ‘You want me to sign that?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said. ‘But I’d hoped we could have a quiet chat somewhere. I’m an agent.’

  ‘And that’s why you want to talk to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Francis and Nowak handle my books here in the UK,’ she said.

  ‘What do they charge you?’

  ‘Fifteen per cent.’

  ‘I’ll do it for seven and a half.’

  ‘Really? As little as that?’

  I’d just given her the first figure that came into my head. If I’d been seriously planning to take her on I’d have suggested fourteen and a half to begin with and negotiated from there, a quarter of a percentage point at a time. There would be no profit in seven and a half. On the other hand, I’d have taken her away from Francis and Nowak.

  ‘You bet,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure I can—’

  ‘Janet’s not taking you out to dinner, then?’

  ‘No, she had another appointment. She’s always very busy.’

  ‘So am I, but I’ve got time for my authors. I know a very good restaurant just up the road from here. Well, it’s very good for what they charge.’

  ‘I’m not one of your authors.’

  ‘You’ve still got to eat, though, haven’t you? Anyway, I also want to talk to you about Crispin Vynall.’

  ‘That tosser!’

  ‘Indeed, as you say, that tosser. May I congratulate you, Miss Söderling, on your command of the English language? The restaurant is just up here on the left.’

  Judging by how little food she ordered, she was not going to be an expensive client. I ordered a little more for myself so that the restaurant didn’t think I was being too cheap.

  ‘That’s the jumbo hamburger with extra bacon and double chips for you, madam? And just a small salad for you, madam?’

  ‘Yes,’ we said simultaneously. ‘And ketchup,’ one of us added.

  While we were waiting for our food Elisabeth had a glass of Pinot Grigio and I had a cup of hot chocolate with cream and extra chocolate and extra cream. (It was cold outside.)

  ‘I was supposed to be meeting Crispin tonight,’ said Elisabeth. ‘We’d arranged to see each other when I came over, but since New Year I’ve heard nothing from him – no confirmation of the date, no apology he can’t make it.’

  We sat in silence for a while. I was puzzled in that I’d started to assume that Crispin had vanished off the radar so effectively by getting a flight over to Sweden. Even after the hand-delivered note, I hadn’t quite abandoned the theory – after all he could have an accomplice in Sussex.

  ‘But he was expecting to see you when you were over?’

  ‘Yes. He said he was looking forward to it.’

  ‘And your relationship was … well, ongoing?’

  ‘I had thought so. I was obviously wrong.’

  I had also assumed that Crispin’s disappearance – wherever he was – had been planned in advance. But it now seemed to be a last-minute decision and one that he had kept a secret from pretty much everyone.

  ‘You know he and his wife have split up?’ I said.

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘Just before Christmas.’

  ‘He told me they’d split up ages ago. You can’t trust men, can you?’

  Well, there was Ethelred, but, like his readers, he’s a bit special.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  My phone beeped. There was a text from Ethelred. Normally under these circumstances I would have ignored a text, but I could see Ethelred there, laboriously typing out the words, with many corrections and deletions and much attention to punctuation, his tongue licking his upper lip all the while, his mouth half-open in wonderment at this strange new technology. Then at the end of twenty minutes or so he would have pressed SEND and collapsed back into his chair with relief.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said to Elisabeth.

  The message (and I was sure that it had taken him a couple of hours to compose it) read: ‘Crispin has been reported as a missing person; the police are investigating.’

  ‘From one of your children?’ asked Elisabeth.

  ‘You could say that,’ I said.

  A waiter approached. Elisabeth smiled at him and shook her head.

  ‘I’ll have the banana sundae,’ I said.

  ‘Extra cream with that?’ asked the waiter, flicking open his notepad.

  I just stared at him in disbelief. ‘Extra cream?’ I said. ‘Do you think I’m the sort of person who orders extra cream?’

  When he returned he brought a large jug and told me to help myself. Silly tosser. Irony only works if you don’t overdo it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ‘Missing?’ said Elsie. ‘So the police think he’s dead?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The report didn’t say that. It’s just that somebody has reported Crispin missing.’

  ‘So who reported him?’

  ‘Not me or Emma,’ I said.

  ‘What if he reported himself missing?’ asked Elsie.

  ‘Could you do that? I mean, anyone can make a report, but the police would surely check on the identity of whoever made it. And it would still be a strange thing to do.’

  ‘No stranger than sending you death threats,’ said Elsie.

  ‘You’ve still got that first letter safe I take it?’ I asked.

  ‘Naturally. I won’t lose it. What about the second one?’

  ‘I dropped it round to Henry. I told him we thought Crispin was the author and he said he wanted to see it. He said he had samples of his handwriting. He’s going to let me know what he thinks of it. I’ll pick the letter up again later.’

  ‘Did you get any more out of Emma?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really. I just ended up making her think I was weird.’

  ‘No shit? How on earth did you manage that?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think probably …’

  ‘Sorry, Ethelred. That was irony.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes. OK, tell me, then – what was her reaction to what you told her?’

  ‘Well, s
he was cross that I hadn’t mentioned the death threats before. Then when I asked whether she knew where Crispin was, she got even crosser and hung up on me.’

  ‘Ethelred …’ Elsie paused for a moment.

  ‘Still here,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t think that maybe she did kill Crispin? I mean, let’s say that Henry did drop Crispin off in Chichester and that he got a train or taxi back to Brighton. So, he shows up at the family home at one o’clock in the morning, completely drunk. He and Emma argue, as they well might. Emma bludgeons him to death with the left-over turkey or whatever is to hand in the kitchen. But she knows that he was out with Henry – the scumbag who lied to her about Crispin and her best friend. So, she reckons she can pin it on him. You phone her with all your questions. She puts two and two together – you are working for Henry. The next thing you know you’ve got a death threat on your mat, implying that Henry is the killer.’

  ‘I’m not sure she even had my address,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s all in the CWA Directory, isn’t it? Any crime writer or agent or their friends and relations could get their hands on that.’

  ‘Whoever wrote the letter would have to live close by – it was hand-delivered in the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘Brighton’s close enough,’ said Elsie. ‘And she kept the BMW.’

  ‘But why does the second note tell me to question Emma more closely if she wrote it?’

  ‘To throw you off the scent,’ said Elsie.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘She would also have Crispin’s phone to hand to send you a text.’

  ‘She said she didn’t.’

  ‘Did I explain that blondes can lie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Elsie, ‘do you want to know the rest of what I’ve discovered?’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Quite a lot more, but I’ve just had to take on two additional clients because of you,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Because of me?’

  ‘Don’t keep repeating what I say like an author trying to pad out a very thin book with unnecessary dialogue. That’s also annoying. And don’t say sorry. That’s even more annoying.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to say sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you were. I’m your agent. I know you better than you know yourself, though that isn’t saying very much.’

  I wondered how to apologise without saying sorry. It probably wasn’t worth trying. Paraphrase probably annoyed Elsie most of all.

  ‘Who have you taken on?’ I asked.

  ‘Elisabeth Söderling and Mary Devlin Jones.’

  ‘I don’t see how having either of them helps me.’

  ‘It was the price of getting the information that you need.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘First, Crispin had arranged to meet Elisabeth on her current trip to London. But he hasn’t. Nor has he left a message.’

  ‘In view of your low opinion of men generally, wouldn’t you say that was par for the course – just clearing off without a word of farewell?’

  ‘Yes, but my opinion of men is in fact much lower than that. There was clearly no-strings-attached sex on offer and he still cleared off. That means his disappearance is not merely odd but unnatural.’

  ‘Men do occasionally decline sex,’ I said.

  There was a brief hesitation on Elsie’s part, as though she might in fact have discovered the same thing.

  ‘At the very least, I don’t think his departure was planned,’ she said. ‘And I’ve found out that Crispin was staying close to you around Christmas time.’

  ‘Didn’t we know that?’

  ‘You assumed it. I proved it.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  She read out a phone number.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘From his agent.’

  Well, of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that? It would have been so easy. So very easy.

  ‘But Janet Francis didn’t say whose number it was?’

  ‘You could say that the way I got it rather precluded that.’

  ‘And I’m now supposed to track him down from the number?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The number is sort of familiar. I could look through my address book and see if it’s there.’

  ‘Phone it, Ethelred.’

  ‘Why don’t you phone it?’

  ‘Because I’ve decided that it’s your job. It might prove to be another writer, then I’d probably need to take them on as a client too.’

  ‘So, you want me to cold-call the number and ask whether they know why Crispin has vanished and then reported himself missing? I suppose it beats pretending to be from Microsoft and claiming that whoever-it-is has a virus on his computer.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Ethelred. You’ll need to be a bit more subtle than that.’

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ I said. ‘So, what did Mary Devlin Jones have to say?’

  ‘She said she’d like to kill Crispin.’

  ‘In that case it’s hardly likely that she has.’

  ‘Unless it’s a double bluff.’

  ‘Which people don’t do in real life. Was that all?’

  ‘Sort of. We talked about this business of Crispin having written her first book for her.’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Yes, but who says it?’ asked Elsie. ‘She claims it’s not true. So who started the story? I mean, who told you?’

  ‘I’d heard rumours before,’ I said. ‘On the Internet.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Elsie.

  I decided to ignore all of the implications in that. ‘Emma filled in a lot of the detail, though,’ I added.

  Elsie paused and then said: ‘Mary said she owed you one. What did that mean?’

  ‘It could mean all sorts of things …’

  ‘Ethelred, have I ever explained this thing where I can tell when you’re lying?’

  ‘OK. I was one of the judges when she won the CWA award.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘I must have done. I’m sure I said that it was one of the few occasions when I had met Crispin.’

  ‘That’s the one where Janet Francis was the other judge?’

  ‘Yes. She didn’t prove a very active judge in the end. She just showed up for the final meeting.’

  ‘So you and Crispin did the shortlisting?’

  ‘Yes. But—’

  ‘But? Either you did or you didn’t.’

  ‘I was fairly busy then too. I had a deadline. You were pushing for a completed manuscript. Crispin produced a shortlist. I took a quick look through some of the other stories …’

  ‘So, Crispin really was in a position to fix things for Mary? All on his own?’

  ‘Arguably. But all three of us signed off on the final decision.’

  ‘In spite of the fact that you hadn’t read most of the stories and Janet probably hadn’t read any of them?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Of course!’ said Elsie. ‘That would also explain why Mary signed up with Francis and Nowak. Janet would have used her position as judge to snap up any promising talent. Except, if Janet was on the judging panel and there was any funny business about who wrote the book, then Francis and Nowak wouldn’t have taken her on.’

  ‘If Crispin did write the book, we weren’t aware of it at the time. That came later.’

  ‘So,’ said Elsie, ‘of the very small number of people involved in that award – Mary has had her career pretty much destroyed, you’ve had death threats and Crispin has vanished.’

  ‘But Janet Francis is OK.’

  ‘Early days yet,’ said Elsie cheerfully. ‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was pretty much inevitable. Early the following day a police car rolled up in my drive and a sergeant got out.

  I had the door open even before he had rung the bell and quickly had him seated with a mug of coffe
e in front of him on the kitchen table. I had of course nothing to tell him – except possibly for Henry’s confession that he had killed Crispin on New Year’s Eve. It seemed a good idea to get this over as soon as I could.

  ‘Do you know Mr Vynall well?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re both writers, but I see him only occasionally. We were judges for a CWA award a few years back. I’ve been on a panel with him at a crime-writing conference. We were talking about whether crime writers should get police procedures correct or whether it’s more important to keep the story going.’

  The sergeant took a sip of his coffee and expressed no opinion. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Probably at Bristol CrimeFest last year.’

  ‘CrimeFest?’

  ‘It’s a festival of crime writing – not of crime.’

  ‘I would imagine not. And that was …’

  ‘Late May.’

  ‘So, no contact since then? No phone calls or emails?’

  ‘No. But …’

  ‘Yes?’

  I wondered whether this was a good idea, but he would certainly have spoken to Emma, so it might seem odd to say nothing.

  ‘I have seen his wife, though. A couple of times. I needed to drop some books off.’

  ‘You dropped books off on two occasions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘In the last few days.’

  ‘Even though you hadn’t seen him since May?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I see. Where were you on New Year’s Eve, sir?’

  ‘Here. I was watching a programme on meerkats.’

  ‘All evening?’

  ‘No. There was other stuff on too.’

  ‘Do you have any witnesses?’

  ‘About what I was watching?’

  ‘About your being here all evening.’

  I would dearly have loved to have been able to say that I had a witness who could confirm the truth of my statement. I hesitated for a moment.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Don’t you think I’d give you a name if I could?’ I said. Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Emma Vynall said that Crispin had left home just before Christmas.’