Crooked Herring

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And he is still missing now.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So he’s been gone two weeks. Why are you asking me specifically about New Year’s Eve? Did whoever reported his disappearance say specifically that that is when it was?’

  ‘That is, if I may say so, sir, none of your business. Unless there is something you’d like to tell me about New Year’s Eve? Something you know but are keeping from us?’

  ‘There’s nothing I want to tell you,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘You seem to have asked Mrs Vynall a lot of questions about Mr Vynall’s disappearance? You were quite concerned about whether he had talked about you?’

  ‘I may have said something like that.’

  ‘For any particular reason?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was just making conversation.’

  ‘But you yourself were worried about Mr Vynall’s disappearance, well before he was reported missing?’

  ‘Yes. You could say that.’

  ‘Mrs Vynall did say that. She said you were very concerned that you couldn’t get in contact with him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you were trying to get in contact with him, then? Even though you say you hadn’t seen him for months?’

  ‘Yes, it was …’ I tried to remember what reason I had given Emma. A book? ‘It was about a short story,’ I said. ‘For an anthology.’

  ‘And you needed the story urgently?’

  ‘Publishers have deadlines,’ I said. ‘You know what it’s like.’ I smiled in the hope of sympathy or at least a vague understanding.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  What else had I told Emma? There was the business of the death threats, but that conversation had surely taken place after she had spoken to the police? The point might come where I had to mention them, but for the moment I could avoid mentioning Henry’s confession. On the other hand, if I said nothing now and the police spoke to Emma a second time (and why not?) then the omission might, in retrospect, look odd.

  ‘Have you lived in this part of the world for very long?’ asked the sergeant.

  ‘I moved here about a year ago,’ I said. ‘I lived just outside Worthing until then.’

  He nodded and closed his notebook. ‘We may need to ask you further questions, sir, but that is all for the moment. Unless you have recalled anything that might be relevant?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Then I added: ‘Mrs Vynall said that she hadn’t reported him missing. So who did?’

  The sergeant paused, as if weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of answering my question. ‘It was a close friend of his. Another writer, like yourself. Mr Henry Holiday.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I watched the police car drive away. What exactly was Henry playing at? How could his own movements on New Year’s Eve be kept a secret if he had contacted the police? What had he told them? And why?

  I needed to speak to Henry urgently, but first I wanted to find out who owned the telephone number that Elsie had obtained from Tuesday at Janet Francis’s agency. I had toyed with the idea of phoning Janet Francis, of course, but I would have had to explain how I’d got the number in the first place. One way or another I’d put off making the call, but it could be deferred no longer.

  I dialled. After the phone had rung six times, it switched to an answerphone. Whoever owned it had not had the know-how, or had simply preferred not, to add a personalised message. I was told that the owner of that number was not available to speak. Not wishing to leave a message, I hung up. It would clearly have to wait until after I had spoken to Henry.

  I sat down at my computer. The police had questioned me very specifically about New Year’s Eve. Had Henry himself told them that that was when Crispin had vanished? Or, contrary to all of the indications that Crispin was still alive, had the police found a body then that they had only just identified as Crispin?

  I opened Google and typed in ‘body found New Year’s Eve’. A body had indeed been found of a New Year reveller who had jumped into a river. But that was at the other end of the country and it had been identified. I tried searching for ‘Crispin Vynall’ but just found page after page of old interviews and reviews of his books. Next I typed in ‘strangled body found Sussex’. Plenty of results there, as you might expect, including some horrifying murders, but nothing recent.

  It was time to go and see Henry again.

  I left the house and unlocked the car, throwing my Barbour onto the back seat. Even as I did so, the action seemed to recall some unfinished business. I could see Henry very clearly flinging his own coat into the boot on the day we went to Didling Green. But I couldn’t remember him taking it out again. Indeed, on our return from the Downs, he had dashed off too quickly for him to be able to retrieve anything. The weather was cold and damp. He must surely have realised that he had mislaid his coat? And yet he had not phoned.

  I walked round and opened the boot. There indeed was the Barbour, with the length of rope beside it. I took the coat out and held it up. It would have fitted me quite well – much too big for Henry. Unless …

  I felt in the pockets. The first yielded only fluff and a few twigs. The second held an envelope with a shopping list on the back: milk, eggs, pasta, shoe polish … Nothing too revealing there. I turned it over. It was addressed to Crispin Vynall.

  For a moment I just stood there, with the rain falling gently and the Barbour in my hands. So had Henry written a shopping list on the back of an envelope addressed to Crispin? Or, more likely, had Henry been wearing Crispin’s Barbour? In which case, why?

  I was about to get in the car and drive the mile or so to Henry’s house when my mobile rang. I answered it.

  ‘Hello, Ethelred, it’s Henry.’

  There was a hiatus as both of us waited for the other to speak.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘You called me,’ said Henry.

  ‘When?’

  ‘About half an hour ago. You called my landline but didn’t leave a message. I’m phoning you back.’

  Even then it took a couple of moments for things to fall into place. Since I was still neither in the house nor in the car, a fine mist of rain was gently soaking into my clothes. It dripped from my hair.

  ‘Crispin was staying with you,’ I said eventually. ‘He was staying with you after he left Emma. It was your phone number he left with his agent.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry.

  ‘So, you didn’t meet up at the Old House at Home. He was already with you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the following morning you knew perfectly well that he hadn’t come home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, you’ve wasted my time, then you’ve reported him missing, exactly as you should have done anyway.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In summary, you’ve known all along where he was.’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And you’ve killed him, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’m coming right over, Ethelred. Stay exactly where you are. I can explain.’

  Shortly afterwards he arrived in a new car. A red Fiat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ‘I’m sorry if I have not told you the entire truth,’ said Henry. ‘But it was necessary.’

  ‘Necessary?’ I said.

  ‘Just give me a chance to explain.’

  ‘I don’t see what justification you can possibly offer,’ I said. ‘You did kill Crispin Vynall, and you knew that all along. The whole memory loss thing was a complete fabrication.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry.

  ‘I just don’t understand why you would want to kill Crispin. Still less why you would want to involve me.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Think back, Ethelred. When did you first hear about me?’

  ‘When? I don’t know. Sometime after your first book was published. Possibly I read a review. Or maybe I saw you on a debut
authors panel at Harrogate or somewhere.’

  ‘No, further back than that.’

  ‘I don’t know then … were you in publishing or something? Did we meet at somebody’s book launch?’

  ‘Publishing? I worked as a waiter while I wrote my first novel. It took seven years – seven years during which I starved for my craft.’

  ‘Starved? In a restaurant? Surely not?’

  ‘I speak metaphorically. Of course, they fed us. I mean the long days spent hunched over a keyboard, deprived of sunlight or the sight of flowers or the sound of children laughing …’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  ‘… or love or affection or money or friends or the sort of simple pleasures other people take for granted …’

  ‘But that’s what being a writer is like,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and it’s worth it when your book is finally published.’

  ‘But yours was.’

  ‘Not the first one. Not the one that I entered for the CWA new writers’ competition.’

  ‘That was the great literary detective novel that you subsequently destroyed?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘You killed Crispin because he awarded the prize to Mary Devlin Jones.’

  ‘He wrecked my career. You all did. You and he and Janet Francis. Crispin’s role was at least an active one – he actually read that first manuscript. Much later he joked that he thought that it was simply too good – he’d been jealous of my talent. That’s why it was never shortlisted. In fact, he’d simply promised Mary Devlin Jones that she’d win the competition and he was carefully knocking out anything that might stand in her way. His motive may have been wholly dishonourable, but he had a reason. But you and Janet couldn’t even be bothered to read it …’

  ‘Crispin told me I didn’t need to,’ I said.

  ‘So you didn’t.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Of course not. Crispin said not to.’ Not even Elsie, at her most sarcastic, could have got the childish whine into that last sentence. Crispin said not to. The note of petulance was real. The wound was still raw. ‘You were a pathetic, feeble excuse for a judge of a literary award, just as you are still a pathetic, feeble excuse for a writer. Weren’t you even curious to see the thing I’d spent seven years working on? You didn’t want to just take a peep at it? Just in case your views were a tiny bit different from Crispin’s?’

  ‘I was busy … there were so many manuscripts to read …’

  ‘Don’t you think that those of us who had submitted our life-work had also been busy? Don’t you think we deserved better?’

  ‘I apologise. Does that help?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  I waited to see what Henry would say next.

  ‘It was a bit like that Count of Monte Cristo, really. The black deeds of my enemies had been exposed – yours, Crispin’s, Janet’s and of course those of Mary Devlin Jones.’

  ‘But Mary was completely innocent,’ I said.

  ‘Only legally and morally,’ Henry sneered. ‘Do you know what total despair feels like, Ethelred? The feeling of utter worthlessness with no hope of anything better? Your soul ripped from your body and tossed aside as worthless dross? Grief such as nobody has ever felt before or will ever feel again?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Actually, most days are a bit like that.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Not like the grief I felt then. Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I’d underestimated you as a writer. Is that from one of your books?’

  ‘It’s Alexandre Dumas,’ he snapped. ‘But he might have penned it for me personally. Crispin wrote to me after the competition. He said that the three of you had read the book and thought it was rubbish. Oh, he presented it as helpful criticism, but that was the general drift. I destroyed the manuscript. I wiped the computer disc clean. I deleted earlier drafts. I tore out the notes I had written on the plot and dumped them in the recycling bin.’

  ‘And then you decided to take your revenge?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I’d assumed your criticism was justified. I admired Crispin as a best-selling author. Janet’s reputation as an agent was then at its peak. I even had some sort of regard for you. How could you all be wrong? At first I resolved to write nothing ever again. Then I thought – well, if Crispin sells so many books, why don’t I just try to write like him? How hard can that be? And it worked. I sold my second novel to my current publisher and I’ve never looked back.’

  ‘Except you did look back. You couldn’t forget what Crispin … what we … had done.’

  ‘It was much later, when I saw Crispin together with Mary Devlin Jones, that alarm bells started to ring. I asked around. Some people had raised their eyebrows when he had awarded the prize to her, but the feeling was that you at least were decent and honourable and that you wouldn’t have allowed the award to go to her unless you felt that she deserved it. Hah!’

  I’m not sure I had ever heard anyone say ‘hah!’ in quite that way before. There was a depth to his bitterness that was quite remarkable. It was like looking into a well whose sides drop away forever into a dark, ice-cold void.

  ‘Once I realised how I had been cheated, I tried to resurrect the lost novel. I could still remember the plot. I found a list of characters that I had jotted down and forgotten about. I set about rewriting it. I’m pretty sure that I got the action in the first chapter exactly as it had been – but the magic had gone. I pressed on chapter after chapter, but when I reread it, it merely sounded smug and pretentious.’

  Henry put his hands to his head as if recalling the anguish anew. One thing that I was not ruling out, because I knew Henry’s work reasonably well, was that the original had been smug and pretentious too. Pretentiousness in other writers is always immediately apparent. It takes time and patience to spot it in your own work. Very often you see it when you return to an old draft after a long break.

  ‘But you were a success …’ I pointed out.

  ‘By your standards, perhaps … I was making money, but I was writing books that I despised. I thought that I could write crime novels that would be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.’

  ‘It doesn’t happen,’ I said. ‘It will never happen.’

  ‘I could have done it,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to write a literary novel myself,’ I added.

  ‘Yes, Ethelred. The difference is that I was actually capable of doing so. I’ve read your stuff, remember? And I’ve talked to your agent. She’s under no illusions – trust me on that.’

  Was there any point in saying that I had thought, in all of my novels, that my literary ambitions were there for all to see? Probably not. I was in any case more and more convinced that, in spite of the reviews he had written, Henry had read none of my books.

  ‘Mary Devlin Jones was the easiest,’ Henry continued. ‘She had blatantly imitated Crispin’s style. Once I knew the two of them were an item, it wasn’t difficult to start a rumour that the book was really Crispin’s. An insinuation here, a word slipped in there. Mary’s rise had been meteoric in its way. Her sales had been excellent. Justifiable praise had been showered on her. She had received the adulation graciously and modestly. People were delighted to discover that she was in fact a talentless hack. As for Crispin, my immediate reaction, when his duplicity became absolutely clear, was quite simply that he deserved to die. Of course, it’s much easier to say that than to do it. It took a while to go a stage further and reason that, as a crime writer, I ought to be able to bump him off and get away with it. It’s all a matter of Motive, Opportunity and Means, isn’t it? I had the Motive, so I worked on Opportunity. I got to know him better. I hung around in the bar with him. I got him to trust me. I had no specific plan in mind – just that when the chance arose, I woul
d take it. One of the best methods, as you know, is simply to push somebody off a cliff. People fall to their deaths pretty much every week. All I’d have to say was that we were both out for a walk together and that he went too close to the edge and slipped. I tried to save him but unfortunately … a terrible scream then a sickening thud on the rocks below. It’s just a matter of choosing a time and place where there are no witnesses – a lonely coastal footpath in Pembrokeshire in January, say, if you can persuade the victim to take a bargain city-break in Haverfordwest. Food poisoning too is good – especially if I had been prepared to give myself a non-lethal dose of the same thing to allay suspicion. So, I extended the hand of friendship, you might say and waited for my chance.

  ‘It came quite unexpectedly and not in a way that I would have predicted. Crispin and Emma were not getting on well, for reasons that will have been clear to you. I had said to Crispin that if things ever became too unpleasant at home, he could come and stay with me. Why, you ask, would he choose me rather than anyone else? Because turning up on somebody’s doorstep with a suitcase and a broken marriage and then requesting to stay for an indefinite period is a test of any friendship, however long-standing. I knew he would have few choices other than me.’

  I nodded. After my split with Geraldine, I’d found much the same thing. I was offered much sympathy but few beds for the night. And nobody suggested that I should move in permanently.

  ‘Having him in my own house seemed to offer up all sorts of possibilities,’ Henry continued. ‘A badly wired plug, fumes from a faulty boiler, a tripwire on the stairs. But for a while relations between him and Emma seemed to improve. So I decided to speed things up a little.’

  ‘You contacted Emma and told her Crispin was sleeping with her best friend?’

  ‘Exactly. It seemed likely to move things on. To cut a long story short, Crispin phoned me and I collected him in my car, Emma having driven off in theirs. He was not a troublesome guest. He had a book to finish and worked most of the time. His contact with the outside world was limited to the odd call to his agent. He welcomed the seclusion my house offered. But I suggested that we let our hair down a bit on New Year’s Eve and hit some of the local nightspots. It was only when we were in the car, with Crispin very drunk, that it struck me that I could probably strangle him there and then without his really noticing. Of course, I’d have a corpse to dispose of, which is awkward, but then an idea occurred to me, because sometimes being very drunk seems to strip out all of the extraneous stuff and allows you to concentrate on the one thing that really matters. I was no longer Henry Holiday. I was Edmond Dantès, I had the Baron Danglars in my passenger seat and he was snoring his head off.