The Herring Seller's Apprentice

by L. C. Tyler

  A further key may be this: While he was always perfectly happy to tell me what he had paid for his tie or which minor celebrity he had dined with the week before, I never learned anything about where he had come from, who his family were or what he had done with his life prior to the age of, say, thirty-five. I am not suggesting that there were dark secrets, but you were left with the feeling that there might be relatively little to boast of. And if Dennis could not boast of a thing, then it tended to get left out of the conversation altogether.

  Dennis’s office proved to be in Wardour Street – a location that somehow manages to feel both expensive and slightly down at heel, the buildings just a little too tall for the width of the roadway. The street was still in shadow, though the morning was well advanced.

  The building itself was thirties art deco, recalling a time when this had been a rather glamorous part of town and the hub of a British film industry that thought it had a real chance of rivalling Hollywood. The decor of Dennis’s office made no concessions at all however to the elegant and now fashionable chrome-work and graceful curves. He clearly had his own idea of faded grandeur based on a house that he had possibly visited or (for all I know) burgled many years before.

  From the moment we entered the room, I could see that Elsie was determined to be impressed by nothing that Dennis had to show her – not the large mahogany-and-leather partner’s desk, not the massive leather sofas, not the shapeless pieces of modern statuary, not even the richness of the carpet (the impossibly deep pile of which made the long walk from the door to Dennis’s desk an entirely silent one). Elsie had elected to wear on this occasion a very tight short skirt and matching jacket, which might have looked good on a number of people. There was undoubtedly, somewhere inside Elsie, a thin fashionable woman trying to get out, and you could only admire her tenacity.

  Dennis extended his hand to me. ‘Sorry to hear about Geraldine, old man. Very tough on you.’

  I shrugged. ‘There’s a lot to sort out,’ I said.

  ‘Of course. And I’ll be delighted to help in any way that I can. But first, would you both like coffee or something stronger?’

  It was ten o’clock in the morning, so it must have been a safe bet that neither of us would opt for a whisky. But perhaps other morning visitors to this office did.

  ‘Coffee, please,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Elsie. She had not taken her eyes off Dennis since entering the room and was now fixing him with a stare. If it was intended to intimidate him, however, it was not working.

  Dennis spoke into an old-fashioned microphone beside his desk, and coffee and biscuits appeared almost immediately.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said, ‘what exactly is it that I can do for you both?’ He smiled an expensive gold smile.

  ‘There are one or two things that it would help me to know,’ I said.

  ‘Fire away. Anything at all.’

  ‘Very well. You had some contact with Geraldine before she disappeared?’

  ‘A bit.’ The smile remained but his manner became guarded. ‘I didn’t know exactly who she was when she first contacted me. She was just somebody who had a proposition for me – I get lots of those in my line of business.’

  ‘Which is … ?’ said Elsie.

  ‘This and that,’ he replied blandly. ‘As I say, I get a lot of propositions, but this one seemed sound enough and to involve no risks – for me at least. Geraldine wanted to invest in some property in the East End, do it up, sell it on to the gentry – such as our good selves.’ He smiled again. ‘She wanted me on the board as an adviser. I was most happy to help her. She didn’t ask me to put money into the scheme – not that I would have, of course. I expect my capital to earn twenty-five, thirty per cent a year. At the best she was going to make fifteen with the market as it was. Maybe twenty with my advice and a following wind. Of course, she found a way to make a hundred per cent, but I didn’t know then that she was going to split with the whole bundle.’ Dennis chuckled approvingly and took a sip of his coffee. ‘Good coffee this. I have a little man who imports it directly from Costa Rica for me. None of your Fair Trade nonsense – he rips the Costa Rican peasants off a treat. I’ll get you some if you like. At cost, obviously.’

  ‘When did you find out who Geraldine was?’ I asked.

  ‘When she chose to tell me, I would imagine.’

  ‘The name meant nothing to you before that? Elizabeth hadn’t mentioned it?’

  ‘Possibly – I really don’t remember. Look … the fact that Geraldine had run off with Elizabeth’s ex might have been significant to the memsahib, but for me this was strictly business, old man. Strictly business.’

  It occurred to me then that the only two people who called me ‘old man’ were Dennis and Rupert. There were patterns everywhere. Rupert dropping one blonde to go for another. Elizabeth moving effortlessly from one poseur to another (admittedly very different). You could not avoid the conclusion that Dennis had at some stage in his life invented himself from scratch every bit as much as Rupert had. What were the patterns in my own life? Whom did I resemble? I preferred not to think about it.

  ‘There must have been a risk that Elizabeth would find out,’ observed Elsie. Her need to make herself heard had finally overcome her desire to put Dennis in his place.

  Dennis gave a half-grin. I guessed that, like Geraldine, he thrived on risk. As such, it would have been a mutual bond and attraction. But Dennis, unlike Geraldine, would have wanted the risk to be defined and controlled.

  ‘Does Elizabeth know?’ I asked. ‘What would she do if she found out, I wonder? What if somebody who knew were to tell her?’

  ‘Who’s going to do that?’ he smiled.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Now hang on, old man …’ Dennis started to say. This was clearly one direction that he had not expected the conversation to take. He was becoming irritated, but he was becoming worried too. I didn’t look like a blackmailer, but then he didn’t look like a crook (or so he imagined anyway).

  ‘Yes,’ I went on. ‘I could tell Elizabeth. Why not? She’s a good friend of mine. You’ve already said that you knew she wouldn’t have approved. You could say that it would be my duty to tell her.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, aware that Elsie had switched her gaze to me, and was now staring at me as though I had started to do a strip-tease while humming ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. But I pressed on. I knew what I was doing. (At least I hoped that I did.) ‘The police haven’t included you in their investigations, either. After all, nobody has told them about your connection with Geraldine. You never can tell.’

  ‘Don’t try to blackmail me, Ethelred. Others have tried before. I’d get you to have a word with them so they could give you a bit of advice, but you might have some difficulty tracking them down.’

  ‘This isn’t blackmail.’

  ‘Well, what do you want then?’

  ‘All I want is for you to answer three questions for me. If you answer them truthfully then neither Elizabeth nor the police will hear a word from my lips. But if I ever find out that you have lied – ever – I will make two short phone calls. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Sure.’ Dennis was less certain than ever what to make of me, but had decided that, for the moment at least, the best policy was to play along. Unlike Elsie he was not looking at me as though I was crazy.

  ‘First question. Do you know what happened to Geraldine the day she disappeared?’

  ‘No, of course not. I was in …’ Dennis consulted a diary (leather-bound, obviously). ‘Strasbourg. Yes, I had a whole series of meetings there. Elizabeth came too. But she told you, surely? I know that I hadn’t seen Geraldine for weeks before that. She was losing interest in actually buying property. Well, we all know why now, don’t we? But even at the time it didn’t strike me as odd that she hadn’t phoned or anything. The project was making no progress. Mentally, I’d already written it off.’

  ‘Thank you.’<
br />
  ‘Well, if that was your first question, it was hardly worth blackmailing me for. You could have had that for nothing.’

  ‘I wanted the answer to come with a cast-iron guarantee. Second question. Did you ever sleep with Geraldine?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you ever sleep with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you want to?’

  ‘Is that the third question?’

  ‘No, still the second.’

  ‘The answer is still no. Oh, she was attractive. Of course she was. And I don’t doubt … well, you of all people would know what she was like. But that would have been one risk too many. I suppose that Elizabeth has already told you about Cathy – our last nanny? I thought so. Well, I’ve no intention of putting myself in that position again. Elizabeth would take the kids and take me for every penny I’ve got. I’m getting too old to throw everything away for a quick leg-over. Satisfied?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Third question?’

  ‘I don’t need to ask the third question,’ I said. ‘I already know that you don’t have the answer.’

  ‘Can I ask what the third question was?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then can I ask you one?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Who do you think killed Geraldine?’

  I paused for thought. ‘I think the police have got it right – they are looking at a serial killing.’

  ‘So, she was about to do a runner and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the details,’ I said.

  ‘So, who took the money out of the account, then?’ interjected Elsie.

  ‘What account?’ asked Dennis, suddenly interested.

  I silently cursed Elsie’s scatter-gun approach to questioning, but this was an aspect of the case that we were going to have to explore with him. I therefore explained about the Swiss account, the whole time carefully watching Dennis’s face to try to tell whether he possibly knew even more.

  Dennis nodded approvingly at the efficiency of the operation and then leaned back in his chair and took out a cigar. He cut the end carefully. ‘I don’t see any problem there. From what I’ve heard, no papers were found with the body – no passport, no driving licence, no cheque-book, no credit cards?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘There you are then. She must have had details of the Swiss account on her too. If there were passwords, she probably had them written down somewhere – most of you mugs do. The chappie who does her in goes through her papers and realizes that he has all he needs to collect the cash, if he moves quickly. He hides the body well enough, and removes anything that might help identify it, to slow things down if it is discovered. He heads off for Switzerland, passport and bank details in hand. Bingo!’

  ‘He,’ said Elsie. ‘He. There’s going to be a problem when he presents the passport at the bank and claims to be Geraldine.’

  ‘How much was in the account?’ asked Dennis.

  ‘Six hundred thousand,’ I said.

  ‘Francs?’

  ‘Pounds.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Dennis. ‘That would split very nicely two ways. Plenty of blonde girls in Switzerland to choose from.’

  ‘Geraldine had an accomplice in England,’ said Elsie. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Who is doubtless keeping very quiet at the moment,’ said Dennis. He lit the cigar and blew out several large puffs of smoke. ‘Case solved.’

  ‘Could be,’ I said. That at least was something that Dennis and I could agree on. Dennis had his reasons for wanting the world to lose interest in the murder of Geraldine Tressider, just as I had mine.

  ‘Funny blokes, serial killers. I knew one in Chelmsford,’ said Dennis, watching his cigar smoke curl up into the air and slowly drift away.

  ‘Chelmsford?’ asked Elsie.

  ‘He was in Chelmsford nick,’ said Dennis thoughtfully. Both his accent and vocabulary had relaxed a little during his discussion of the murder. Now, just for a moment, a heavy curtain blanketing the past seemed to have been twitched aside. But just as quickly its folds swung back again. The light that had gleamed briefly was extinguished. The old manner and accent reasserted themselves. ‘You meet some odd coves in my line of work, of course.’

  ‘Which is?’ asked Elsie.

  ‘A bit of this. A bit of that,’ he replied. ‘More coffee, dear lady?’

  Twenty

  It was shortly after that meeting that Elsie made a strange remark to me, though perhaps with hindsight it did make some sense.

  ‘Elizabeth never did have an eye for the genuine article, did she?’

  ‘Dennis, you mean? No, he clearly isn’t what you might call out of the top drawer.’

  ‘Dennis and Rupert.’

  ‘Rupert?’

  ‘My old man knew Rupert’s old man quite well.’

  ‘In Southend?’

  ‘They were both in the same business – fruit and veg.’

  ‘What, you mean that Rupert’s father ran a fruit-and-vegetable stall?’

  ‘Maybe not that. He was apparently quite well off as these things go. But he used to do business with my old man, so he wasn’t exactly the Duke of Westminster. He used to give my old man credit, so he wasn’t exactly Albert Einstein either.’

  I did not try to argue with her, though I later wondered how Elsie’s father, who had probably never met Rupert, could be so certain that it was Rupert’s father that he had met and done business with. That his father might have made his money from fruit and vegetables added yet another side to Rupert’s character, but it did nothing to solve the more immediate problems that confronted me.

  But the meeting with Dennis had cleared up one doubt in my mind. It had, if you like, closed one of the many doors that had been annoyingly open when the policeman first brought me the news of Geraldine’s disappearance. My problem now was that I had been too successful in ruling out lines of inquiry and had left myself nowhere to go. There was one vital piece of information I still required, but it seemed that I would have to wait for that to come to me – if it ever chose to do so.

  The police investigation too seemed to be losing the brisk momentum with which it had began. Nobody now searched Cissbury Ring for clues, and the remnants of blue-striped tape had vanished from the gorse bushes. Contact with the police became, for me, a rarer event. My brief notoriety in the village too had come and gone. The few people who knew I had any connection with the case (and nobody in Findon had ever met Geraldine in real life) had ceased even to comment on the bizarre coincidence of her death. I had been told that I would need to attend a coroner’s court, then that I would not be needed after all. I was told that the police would soon have further information, then heard nothing from them for weeks. I was still a step or two ahead of the police, but it was doing me no good.

  I did not expect the case’s appearance on television to take things forward, nor do I think it eventually did. But that evening I naturally felt obliged to be in front of my television set in Findon, as I knew Elsie would be in Hampstead. Geraldine’s last known movements and the finding of the body were reported in detail, with just a few significant facts withheld, as I believe is customary in these cases. (Fairfax would have no truck with the media, so appeals to the public via the television are an aspect of police work that I have never researched.) The presenter made it clear that the police saw this as just one of a series of murders committed in West Sussex, and ended by appealing for information concerning the whereabouts of Mr George Peters, who the police thought might be able to help them with their inquiries. Mr Peters was urged to contact them if only to rule himself out of the investigation. (‘Oh, right,’ I thought. ‘I’m sure he’ll be only too happy.’)

  Of course, it was not the only case featured that evening and again I was struck by the patterns, the coincidences. There were strange parallels, for example, in another case – one Mary Jones of Margat
e, whose face now appeared on the screen, smiling shyly. Miss Jones too had had a failing business, though in her case it had been a design consultancy. On the day of her disappearance, she had visited Bournemouth to make a presentation to a company that she hoped would offer her some work. She was deeply in debt and this was, acquaintances had darkly told the police, a meeting that she saw as her last chance to save her business from failure. She had arrived in Bournemouth by train and allowed ample time for a meeting that she expected might take two hours; it had in fact been curtailed after fifteen minutes. She was informed that her approach was not one that would suit the client concerned: they had no wish to waste any more of her (or their) time. She thanked them politely and left, saying that she would perhaps visit a local art gallery before catching the return train. She was never seen again, other than the obligatory blurred image on a security camera in a department store. A little later £400 was withdrawn from her bank account in two separate transactions using her cash card.

  She had no close family and, it seemed, few friends. It had been over two weeks before anyone even thought to report her missing. We had been treated to a few charming shots of Bournemouth, but now Mary’s picture was flashed up on the screen again. Had anyone seen her on the day of her disappearance in September or in the weeks that followed? She smiled at us out of the television, in a picture taken at a party perhaps or on a rare day out. ‘I’m probably dead, but please don’t trouble yourself on my account,’ it seemed to say. You felt that this lightly freckled face could have been quite pretty, given even minimal effort, but the long mousy hair did not flatter her, nor did her lack of make-up. Her dress, as far as one could tell, looked drab and old-fashioned. You could almost see her at the presentation: shy, diffident, lacking in confidence, bound not to succeed. In one small vignette you saw an entire life of humiliating failure. ‘Where did she go after the meeting?’ asked the presenter. Had we seen her? Could we help? But you could have passed her a dozen times in the street without noticing her. So, no, probably not.