by L. C. Tyler
There were three others who had also vanished without trace. Wayne, a wannabe actor, had left home for London and never reported in. Single mother Paula was believed to be sleeping rough in the Manchester area without single baby Tiffany, who awaited her return. Ada, nice old dear and sufferer from Alzheimer’s, had not been seen by neighbours for two weeks and was believed to have wandered off to her ultimate doom and destruction. Had we seen them? Could we help?
All four pictures appeared again, each occupying one-quarter of the screen – four total strangers juxtaposed for an instant in time. A number to ring was flashed up, partly obscuring Wayne and Ada, who had drawn the short straw and chanced to comprise the bottom half of the picture.
Then it was on to a shocking case of the impersonation of a gas-meter reader in Sevenoaks; and Wayne, Ada, Paula and Mary were returned to the back burner.
The phone rang and I knew that it would be Elsie.
‘Well?’ she said, getting, as ever, straight to the point.
‘It won’t help,’ I said.
‘She wasn’t murdered by a serial killer,’ she said. ‘I’m certain of that. You know it, too. Remind me again why you told Dennis the Menace that you believed the police version?’
‘Because it really doesn’t matter who it was,’ I said.
‘How can you say that?’
‘It’s true. It doesn’t affect anything.’
‘I’ve been thinking, Ethelred, shouldn’t we tell the police about the Swiss bank account at least? I know that it would be embarrassing for Smith – but that can scarcely worry you. I suppose that it might also mean the creditors get their hands on the money and Rupert will lose out too. But neither of them are exactly deserving cases. Quite the reverse – next to Geraldine, the two of them must have done you more harm than anybody. Surely you can’t feel any need to protect them?’
‘The harm that has been done cannot be undone,’ I said. ‘None of it.’
‘You’re in a cheerful mood tonight.’
‘Programmes about crime do that to me.’
‘Don’t have nightmares,’ said Elsie.
‘I won’t.’
But all that night, whenever I closed my eyes I saw the sad, haunting face of Mary Jones – the long mousy hair, the freckles, the apologetic smile. What had been in her mind the day she disappeared? Was she, like Geraldine, planning to vanish quietly and start afresh elsewhere?
In the grey half-light of a winter dawn I went to the cramped little room that serves as the kitchen to my flat and made myself a cup of coffee. Then I sat there alone, sipping it very slowly.
Twenty-one
Feuillet sans date
Something has happened to me; I can no longer doubt it. The change has not come suddenly. Indeed it has come so slowly that even now I am unsure when the process began, if indeed it can be called a process. But I am aware that things which were once familiar to me now look strange and unnatural.
Take my police notebook for example. To all appearances it is much as before – a simple spiral-backed A6 block with a stiff blue cover. It sits in front of me on my desk as it has, and many others have, before. It is a notebook with sixty or seventy pages of ruled paper. That is all. It is the most ordinary thing imaginable, an object that is so insignificant as to be almost unnoticeable. Yet I am afraid of it.
No, not afraid. How can one be afraid of a notebook? But simply to view it fills me with loathing. If I touch it, I know that I shall feel warm bile rising in my throat; the room will begin to dissolve. The cover of the notebook will be rough and dry as old parchment. It will crumble in my hand. It is a thing utterly alien, subtle, menacing in its impermanence.
So, is it that this notebook has changed subtly over the past weeks and months? Have my desk, my chair, my carpet assumed new characteristics without my being aware of what was happening? This is improbable. But, if that is so, then I must accept that I myself have changed, that I am less myself than I was before. In which case, who am I now?
Outside the sun is shining on the green fields. I can see trees, a river, some cattle. Yet, even as the ideas form in my mind, I realize the words themselves have lost their meaning. Very well, then. I need to try to analyse what I see, what I feel. If I had to define what is in front of me, I would say that it is a fine day in July and that the scene is a typical English country landscape. Nothing wrong with that. Why then does this too make me feel nothing but nausea?
It is true that I am subject to sudden change. There was a time when I drank heavily, even at the office. Then one day I simply stopped – for a while at least. My interests have changed too. At about the same time that I stopped drinking I developed an interest in Norman architecture that absorbed me totally. Why?
Perhaps if I record day-by-day what my feelings are I can record the nuances, classify them, make comparisons. And yet at the end, I know what lies at the bottom of it all is [word left blank in the manuscript].
3 heures et demie
Three thirty. Too early to do anything, too late to do anything. I shall have to wait until evening comes. Then we shall see. But in the meantime I remain slumped in my chair, too enervated even to turn away from the objects on my desk which so disgust me. I can only just see from my window the awning of the Cathedral Tea Rooms, yet I can hear, from behind their lace curtains, the unmistakable sound of ragtime music building slowly to a crescendo. I know this record well. In another few seconds the negress will start to sing. It is inevitable, unavoidable, and absolutely necessary that this should happen. For an instant the music ceases, then her voice cuts through the hot afternoon air:
Some of these days
You’ll miss me honey!
This is true, I think. Some of these days you’ll miss me. That at least is a certainty.
Edit.
Select All.
Delete.
Twenty-two
I can no longer remember precisely why I chose the latter part of the fourteenth century for my historical novels. It was as good a time as any, and nobody had done it recently – not as detective fiction, anyway. Today of course a new writer of historical whodunits would find that there were few empty slots in the calendar, but I was in there early enough to stake my claim to Richard II and to mine that slender seam of gold for what it was worth. It has been worth four books so far. Like so many other things in my life, it could have been worse.
All ages, if you examine them closely enough, prove to be periods of transition. Nothing stands still and each century is (depending on your viewpoint) a dusty trackway from the last or the green lane leading to the next. Or whatever. But the late fourteenth century …
Though few at the time had yet noticed, large cracks were starting to appear all over the proud but grubby facade of feudalism. Soon the tidal wave of the Peasants’ Revolt would surge up from the coasts of Essex and Kent, until it spilled over the walls of London and gurgled into the stinking River Fleet. And though it would all trickle away again with the ebb tide, it would leave a strange and unfamiliar landscape in its wake, smelling of fresh salt air and dead fish: a rich soil in which all manner of unexpected things might grow, given time.
Of greater interest to me as a writer was that, in that same fertile landscape, French was giving way to English as the language of literature. A certain Geoffrey Chaucer was busy at his day job in the king’s service, while turning out the occasional poem.
I originally had the idea of making Chaucer the central character in the novels – the first was to be called Inspector Chaucer Investigates – but, once the novelty of Chaucer as a policeman had worn off, there seemed little more to the joke than that. I eventually came up with a minor official in Chaucer’s office: Master Thomas, a failed physician employed as a clerk, who was able to use both his position at court and his medical knowledge to solve the crimes that occurred with surprising regularity (two and a half per book on average) in and about an otherwise dull customs office. I came to the books with no preconceptions about Chaucer’s cha
racter, other than to be vaguely well disposed towards a fellow writer. Viewed from Master Thomas’s eyes he rapidly became a loathsome windbag, driving his staff to exhaustion, belittling all literary efforts except his own and flaunting his tenuous links with the aristocracy. He was also a plagiarist. Many of his finest lines proved to have been stolen from Master Thomas, who was also unwise enough to share with Chaucer his plans to write a book about some pilgrims going to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. (‘Canterbury,’ said Chaucer with a condescending smile. ‘In spite of some passing resemblance to the modest little manuscript that you showed me, my own work concerns Canterbury. Another place entirely, my dear Master Thomas. Now, what were you saying a moment ago about April showers?’) One feature that Thomas shared with Fairfax was that he received almost no credit for his efforts, literary or detective, and looked fated to remain for ever a clerk in the Customs House. For a while I feared that Master Thomas would merely become a fourteenth-century Fairfax, but he remained obstinately chirpy and shared none of Fairfax’s introspectiveness. Nor, surprisingly, did he share Fairfax’s interest in church architecture. In the fourteenth century Perpendicular was replacing Decorated as the dominant style, but Thomas declined to make any observations on the subject other than to note, on a visit to Canterbury Cathedral, that the remodelling of the nave was producing an unreasonable amount of dust.
I think that I was attracted to the period above all, however, by the character of Richard II, who also made several appearances in my books. Richard was a man born out of his time. He would have made an excellent Tudor. He would have passed unnoticed in a whole crowd of Stuarts. But he simply could not hack it as a Plantagenet. A later age would have understood why he wished to appoint ministers who were loyal to him personally rather than merely loyal to their class. A later age would have agreed that it was not an important role of a king, still less an essential one, to lead troops into battle. A later age would have understood a king’s wish to be a man of learning and a patron of the arts rather than a soldier. A later age might even have understood his ideas on the nature of kingship. The fourteenth century just looked at him as if he had farted and offered the throne to Henry IV, a man who knew how to wield a sword and who said ‘lavatory’ rather than ‘toilet’. Richard II had all the right ideas at the wrong time. Did he interest me in spite of his evident failure or because of it? Again, I would not care to say. The investigation of his lonely death (from starvation in all likelihood) was to be the next of the Master Thomas stories. Of course, I knew that I would never write it now. Just as I would never write another Fairfax novel, however hard I might try.
Twenty-three
Fairfax stood by the side of his desk and surveyed his office.
‘Pathetic,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Pathetic.’
He walked round to the other side of his desk and again surveyed the room.
‘As I thought,’ he said. ‘No better from this side. But do they care? Oh no, that wouldn’t be politically correct, would it? Pathetic, that’s what it is.’
There was the sound of the door opening behind him.
‘Good morning, Sergeant Fairfax,’ said Constable Pooh.
‘Good morning Sergeant Fairfax,’ said Constable Piglet.
‘Good?’ said Fairfax. ‘Yes, I suppose that it is good for some people, Constable Piglet. Good for muggers, I would imagine. Not bad for drug dealers, paedophiles and teenage delinquents. I expect that they are all having a lovely time, and (don’t get me wrong) I’m very happy for them and for all their social workers. But there are some for whom it is not as good as others. I’m not complaining. But that is how it is.’
‘Is something the matter?’ asked Constable Pooh.
‘Matter? With me, Constable Pooh? Why should you think that?’
Constable Pooh considered this for a moment. He put his head on one side and then, since that did not seem to work, he put it on the other. Then he looked up at the ceiling.
‘Precisely,’ said Sergeant Fairfax. ‘All around me you can see the many things that I have to be happy about.’
Constable Pooh looked round the office again and then under the desk. ‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Can’t you see them? Promotion? The esteem of my colleagues? The support and respect of a grateful public? A top-of-the-range sports car? Heaps of banknotes? Joie de vivre? (That’s French for sex, by the way.)’
‘No,’ said Constable Pooh. ‘No, I can’t.’
‘Neither can I,’ said Fairfax. ‘Odd that. You’d have thought after a lifetime with the police force, a lifetime of selflessly fighting crime, I might have had just one of those. Two would have been nice, but I would settle for just one.’
‘I think that I had the respect of the public once,’ said Constable Pooh, ‘but I must have mislaid it somewhere. I will ask Christopher Robin.’
‘You are a policeman of very little brain,’ said Fairfax. ‘That is why they all run rings round you: the villains, the leftie politicians, the interfering do-gooders who wish to defend the civil rights of a criminal to commit crimes unharassed by the likes of you and me. You go out on the beat with both arms tied behind your back and then they criticize you because old ladies are getting mugged on their way to church by youths who have bought their knives with social security money. Crime doesn’t pay? Don’t make me laugh. We’re just on the wrong side.’
‘I thought that criminals were on the wrong side of the law,’ said Constable Pooh.
‘Not any more. We’re the ones to be watched now. We’re the ones to be monitored. Forget catching villains, Constable Pooh. If you want promotion, just meet your equal opportunities targets.’
Pooh was not sure what to reply to this and so just hummed to himself for a while.
Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire pie
A lie can’t kill, but a killer can lie
Ask him who done it and he’ll reply:
Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire pie
At the end of the first verse, Sergeant Fairfax had not actually flung him out of the office, so Constable Pooh sang the second verse, but very quietly and just to himself:
Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire pie
She’s def’nitely dead, but we don’t know why
So go and ask Tressider and he’ll just reply:
Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire, Buckfordshire pie.
‘Tressider!’ muttered Fairfax. ‘I shan’t be working with him again.’
‘Why not?’ asked Constable Piglet.
‘Why not? How should you know a thing like that, good trusting little Piglet? You do not yet understand the evil of this world or the duplicity of writers. But he knows why not. He knows what he’s done. Oh yes, he knows what he’s done, all right. Don’t you, Tressider? Don’t you, Tressider, you criminal?’
Edit.
Select All.
Delete.
‘I had no choice,’ I said to the blank screen. ‘I couldn’t have done anything else. And I was in France, dammit.’
Still, it would not be long now. There was that consolation. It would not be long now.
Twenty-four
They buried her in December. For a long time they would not release the body, but then, just before Christmas, we were finally allowed to lay Geraldine to rest.
I had assumed that she would be buried in the churchyard at Feldingham, possibly alongside my old buddy and college friend, Pamela Hamilton-Boswell. Ethelred announced however that Geraldine had always expressed a firm desire to be cremated. This surprised me in that A) Geraldine never planned anything that far ahead and B) even if she had, she was not one to contemplate her own death for long enough to express any wishes at all. Still, Ethelred had undeniably been married to her and it was not impossible that they had amused themselves on rainy afternoons by discussing each other’s funerals. And who was I anyway to express an opinion as to whether the Bitch should burn or rot? Both were fine with me.
So, on one of the ra
re bright sunny days that winter I found myself driving rapidly (I was late, naturally) back into the wilds of the Essex marshlands. My new black skirt was slightly too tight for effective gear changes, but the roads were empty and wound undemandingly through the flat countryside and towards the sea. The midday sun remained obstinately low in the sky and cast long shadows over the ploughed fields. But it was a cheerful scene, with light strangely reminiscent of a summer morning.
The crematorium was in one of those pretty but over-formal parks that fool nobody into thinking they are anything other than what they are. The big chimney belching black smoke is always a dead giveaway, in my opinion. The good old funeral conveyor belt was operating nicely, with one jolly little party emerging from the back door as ours was entering at the front. I parked my VW next to a large new BMW with immaculate black paintwork and tan hide seats (Dennis had made it to his former business partner’s send-off, clearly) and set off at a brisk but ladylike pace so that I’d make it before the coffin did.
My father was the youngest of a large family, so I’ve been to the funerals of assorted relatives over the years and am used to the routine. A bloke with his collar on back to front goes, ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’ and a few old dears snivel. You kneel down, stand up, sing, wonder whether you remembered to lock the car, sit down, pick your nose, think, ‘It’s a sodding crematorium – nobody’s going to nick a car from here,’ stand up, sing again, and that’s about it, really. Piece of piss. Unless you’re the corpse.