The Herring Seller's Apprentice

by L. C. Tyler

  I suppose my feelings on getting to the end were, as I have so often felt at Christmas,that it had all been something of a let-down. I knew very little now that I didn’t know before, except that Ethelred’s heating system had a seven-day timer and that his car insurance was with the Civil Service Motoring Association, neither of which facts was exactly riveting. But it served to remind me that the core to the mystery – the nature of Ethelred’s Quest – was still unsolved. From the moment he returned from France, nothing he did had really made sense and in spite of my best efforts as a herring seller’s apprentice I really had no better idea now of who had killed Geraldine or what Ethelred had had to do with the business than I had at the start.

  Then, in that terrifying, yawning gulf between the Queen’s speech and the earliest you can decently go to bed, I had one of those ideas that I just knew I would end up regretting. France! Yes, of course, that was the line of inquiry that I had overlooked. If I was to understand Ethelred’s actions all that autumn, surely the key to it lay in his trip to France? Was it a coincidence that he was away when Geraldine disappeared, or had it all been planned? Wasn’t the logical conclusion that I should get on over to Châteauneuf-sur-Whatever and check it out? Well, I should think so. I looked at the map. There was the choice between an orange autoroute heading unerringly south via Paris or an elegant arc along various red routes nationales down through the Pas de Calais and Normandy. I instinctively went for the scenic route. It’s amazing how many crap decisions you can make in a single evening if you put your mind to it.

  I suppose that I started to have real reservations as I manoeuvred the car off the Shuttle at Calais and noticed that people seemed, for some reason, to be driving on the wrong side of the road. This clearly was not going to be a trip on which I could allow my attention to wander.

  I’d timed it all so that I would do most of the drive overnight and have the roads to myself – another of those things that seemed a good idea when I thought of it, but less good now I looked through bleary eyes at the traffic streaming south into the darkness.

  It was somewhere around Abbeville that it occurred to me that my motor insurance probably didn’t cover me for this trip, and just outside Rouen that it struck me that it might have been advisable, in the holiday season, to pack some French money with me in case the banks were closed. I stopped at a place advertising itself as Louviers and tried my bank card in a hole-in-the-wall machine, fully expecting it to vanish without trace, but the machine delivered a hundred euros. Feeling that I was on a winning streak, I stopped again at Evreux and, in a brightly lit but deserted square, drew out two hundred. I wasn’t sure exactly how this trip was going to turn out, but I reckoned that I would need all this cash and more before it was over.

  After Evreux the roads became eerily empty for a bit and I developed a tendency towards what I can only describe as sleep-driving. I flashed through shuttered villages where every living thing seemed to have vanished behind the stone and half-timbered walls. With me on the road this was a wise move. From time to time a massive lorry travelling in the other direction would dazzle me with its headlights, then I would be left alone to drive on the right or left as I thought best.

  At Verneuil (scene of an English victory in 1424, as I am sure you will know) I realized that at the last junction I had completely lost the concept of a left turn and that, if I was to finish the trip alive, I needed rest. So I parked at the first layby, locked the doors and crashed out for a few hours. I awoke to grey skies, a gentle French drizzle and the knowledge that I still had some way to go.

  Six chocolate croissants and a cup of coffee at Châteauneuf-en-Thimerais restored my belief that life was worth living and I pressed on southwards towards Orléans. I reached Châteauneuf-sur-Loire in the late morning, and quickly identified the hotel at which Ethelred had stayed.

  It was on the river but in all other respects it was a right dump. Old chintzy wallpaper, sun-bleached mahogany, heavy velvet curtains and a funny smell dating back to the fifties. Under the circumstances there was nothing for it but to hold my breath, check in and then proceed with my investigations as best I could. I spent most of a leisurely lunch thinking through possible strategies, but without coming to any definite conclusions other than that I was obviously a total dickhead to come here at all. Still, nothing ventured and all that.

  I waited until after dinner that evening, when the reception desk was quiet and nobody much was around, to engage the receptionist in conversation.

  I asked him for a stamp as a plausible pretext for approaching him. He obliged, letting me offer in return the comment that it was very pleasant here in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, to which he was pleased to shrug in a Gallic manner, intimating that he did not give a shit what I thought about anything. I smiled my best and sexiest smile. My friend Monsieur Ethelred Tressider had recommended the hotel, I said. Perhaps he (the receptionist) recalled Monsieur Tressider? He said, ‘Paf’ or something of the sort, adding that the Old Bill had been round asking questions. He seemed particularly proud of knowing that les flics were called the Old Bill in English. A graduate of the Dennis Rainbird School of Languages, no doubt. And what, I wondered, had the Old Bill asked him? Not much, just to confirm the dates of Monsieur Tressider’s stay, which he was content to do.That was all.‘Paf,’ he observed again to nobody in particular.

  Well, we were getting on like a house on fire and no mistake, so I asked him to suggest a few things I might do in Châteauneuf and its environs. What, for example, had Monsieur Tressider done? He had, it seemed, spent a great deal of time out on the terrace with his portable computer. He had been very content to sit and write. He had been working on a new roman with which he had been very pleased. It was crap, I said. Dog crap. ‘Merde du chien?’ he repeated slowly, clearly a little puzzled, in spite of my uncanny grasp of French idiom.

  ‘Forget it. What else did he do?’ I asked.

  Monsieur Tressider had apparently also visited a number of châteaux. Hélas, they would be closed at this time of year but the art gallery would be open at Orléans and possibly the local museum of cheese and viticulture. He had details somewhere. He would let me have them tomorrow morning.

  He seemed ready to finish the conversation at that point and turn his attention back to his magazine, so I tried another line of questioning: Had Monsieur Tressider received any visitors while he was at the hotel? A lady perhaps? The concierge stiffened considerably. Certainly not, he said. At the Hôtel Printania down the road such things might be arranged, but his was a respectable family hotel. No, I said, nothing dodgy – just a friend from England passing through, perhaps? A blonde bitch with freckles? Nobody, he said. He was alone all the time. Did anyone phone him? I enquired.

  Now he did more than just stiffen. He carefully folded his magazine and looked me straight in the eye. Why did I want to know? The implication was that, whatever my reason, he wasn’t planning to tell me until I told him what I was up to.

  A range of possible lies occurred to me, some more implausible than the others. I selected one at random. I was, I said, a private detective employed by Monsieur Tressider’s wife. Monsieur Tressider was suspected of infidelity and I was here to gather what evidence I could. If there was some small charge for supplying the information, I would be happy to pay. Quite why I decided to say this was not entirely clear to me, except that it was much more straightforward than the truth and I had most of the necessary French vocab for it.

  At first I thought I had made a major error because, when I spoke of marital infidelity, he seemed inclined to side as a matter of principle with the unjustly accused husband. But fortunately the word ‘pay’ immediately appealed to his finer and nobler instincts. He scratched his nose and looked me up and down, as if assessing what he could sting me for. So, what did I need to know?

  Did anyone phone Monsieur Tressider? Did he phone anyone? Well, said the concierge, it would be difficult, against hotel regulations and contrary in all likelihood to the Code Napoléon, bu
t it might be possible to check outgoing calls. How much dosh did I have in mind? I suggested one hundred euros. He said, ‘Paf.’ I said one-fifty and he said that he would, in return for the money in advance, let me see all of the records of Monsieur Tressider’s stay. If I went to my room he would bring them up to me when the coast was clear.

  He arrived twenty minutes later with a ledger and a beer, the delivery of which was to be his pretext for coming to the room if anyone asked. I said that I did not like beer. He shrugged and sat there drinking it himself, the froth decorating his moustache, while I read what papers there were.

  The bill detailed the usual extras and impositions of hotel life – newspapers, bar bills, dinners most evenings, and just two telephone calls, apparently charged at the usual hotel rate of about a zillion euros a minute. Both calls were to the same number in the UK – a fifteen-minute call and a much shorter call almost immediately afterwards. And the date was the evening before Geraldine’s murder. Even as I looked at the paper, I felt that here was a genuine clue staring me straight in the face. I went through the bar bills and so on once again, not because I expected to find anything, but because I’d paid almost a hundred pounds for this and wanted to get my money’s worth.Then I scribbled down the number – the only bit of evidence I’d gained – signed a chitfor the beer I hadn’t ordered and told the receptionist that he might now piss off and spend his ill-gotten gains.

  After he had gone, I sat looking at the number.There was the UK code, then there was 20, so this was a London number.The next bit, 7607, was, as far as I remembered, an Islington prefix. Of course, if I really wanted to know whose number it was, there was one way to find out without further delay.

  Unlike Ethelred, I did have a mobile that worked outside Sussex, though doubtless I would be charged large numbers of euros for daring to use it on the wrong side of Calais. Still (as I may have observed in the past) nothing ventured and all that. At the far end the phone rang six times.

  Then there was a click and then a dead person spoke to me.

  ‘You have reached Geraldine Tressider. I am afraid that I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you would like to leave a message I will get back to you as soon as I can.’

  Well, that’s a trick I’d like to see, I thought.

  There was a beep at the far end and I left a recorded message of ten seconds of heavy breathing before I realized that I was still pressing the phone hard against my right ear.

  There were clues here staring me in the face. I knew Ethelred had only just sold the flat, and that it was still empty, but why had he not cancelled the phone ages ago? Why could I still get Geraldine’s answerphone? What exactly was the advantage of keeping that going?

  It was an interesting question, but it didn’t really lead anywhere, so I took my emergency chocolate from my bag and flopped down onto the hard hotel bed. I unwrapped the bar and, though this was usually a sacred moment for me, took the first bite almost without noticing what I was doing. So, what did I now know that I had not known before? Ethelred had phoned Geraldine the evening before she was killed. Twice. One short call, one long one. What did that mean? It meant if nothing else he could have known her plans – pre-cisely where she would be the next day at what time. But what had he done next? There was no subsequent call to the hit man in London, which was good news. On the other hand he could have gone out to a phone box or sent an email from an Internet cafe, so that really proved very little.

  One short, one long. It was like Morse code. One short, one long. I stared at the ceiling repeating the words to myself until I drifted off to sleep, but awoke the following morning eight hours older and no wiser. I pulled back the curtains.The dawn was grey and rain was falling softly on the Loire Valley.

  Twenty-six

  The journey back along the orange autoroute was a piece of piss, though the traffic around Paris was interesting. All the way, the rain lashed down and the windscreen wipers swished and I thought of those two phone calls. I stopped only for lunch in an anonymous service station, where I had moules frites, and was back on the proper side of the Channel by late afternoon. Just over two hours later I was in Findon, ringing Ethelred’s doorbell and getting no reply. Then,and only then,did I remember that he was supposed to be up in Scotland,teaching on some jolly New Year writers’course.The fee on offer had been good and Ethelred had, unusually, been keen on the cash. It looked like being a wet and dreary trek back to town.

  But first,yes, obviously, chocolate.

  The lights were still on in the post office, which seemed a good place to re-stock before starting home. I had become quite a regular customer there and could have located what I needed blindfolded if necessary. Karen, the owner, had been about to close up, but she kindly waited while I chose the largest bar I could find and paid for it.

  ‘You’ll have heard the news, then?’ she asked as I handed over the coins.

  ‘News?’

  ‘They caught the man who murdered Mrs Tressider,’ she said. ‘Sort of.’

  So, I thought, I’ve driven over a thousand kilometres to the Loire and back, only to find that all of the action has been going on in Findon. Brilliant.

  ‘What do you mean – sort of?’ I asked.

  Karen showed me a copy of the West Sussex Gazette. ‘Murder Suspect Killed in Car Chase,’ said the headline.

  ‘The police spotted his car in Findon Valley’said Karen.‘He made a run for it. You know that sharp bend by Windlesham House School? Apparently he tried to take it at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and that was that. In the end they had to identify him by his dental records.’

  ‘And … ?’

  ‘It was that Peters fellow that they’d been looking for.’

  I bought the Gazette as well as the chocolate – not that it would tell me much more than I already knew, but I felt that at this moment I needed hard facts to keep me going. Had I only known, I had a whole mass of facts hurtling in my direction. So, under the circumstances, I could have saved myself 37p, but nobody ever tells you these things until too late, do they?

  The following day I went for an early-morning walk on the Heath, something I almost never do on the grounds that just looking at the joggers makes me feel shagged out. They were there in force that morning, splashing along the paths in their Day-Glo winter Lycra and Nike gloves. (You wouldn’t credit what some people wear.) The dog people were there too, walking their Labradors and poodles and terriers, clutching their green bags of poop – like badges of good citizenship. What with the joggers and the dog-walkers there was hardly any space left for normal people to walk and think.

  Back at my flat I went through Ethelred’s boxes again. There were the manuscripts. I laid them out on the floor, but they were just as he had said – paper versions for the early novels, disks for the later ones. Also the one about the penkwen. No extra clues there.Then I looked at the jewellery. One or two nice pieces, that gold chain for example, butfor the most part nothing of any greatvalue.Geraldine had presumably taken the better stuff with her, and it had vanished with everything else. What was left was the sort of thing that you hang onto for sentimental reasons, but most of which should have now found its way into some charity shop rather than Sotheby’s. Geraldine might have wanted them during her lifetime, but why was Ethelred hanging onto them?

  Finally, I went through the photograph albums one by one.There were the early ones, with a youthful-looking Ethelred and a smiling Geraldine by his side.Then some that were clearly later. Snaps of an older Geraldine. Geraldine with Rupert. Rupert with somebody else. Rupert and Geraldine at somebody’s wedding. Rupert on his own.

  But of course. These were not Ethelred’s photograph albums at all. They were Ceraldine’s. So why would Ethelred give me these rather than his own for safekeeping? I could see their value to Geraldine while she was alive, of course, but they would mean nothing to Ethelred. Why would he want them now that Geraldine was dead?

  I don’t know if you do jigsaws, but there is always a sta
ge where you would swear that the morons have left a piece out yet again. You search through the box, but nothing looks even vaguely like the bit you need. Then you pick up a bit you knew you had all the time, turn it round, and suddenly Bob’s your uncle. It was just like that now.The piece I had needed was sitting there all the time,just waiting to be seen the right way up.

  Yes, why should anyone want them now that she was dead? A cold chill ran down my spine.And atthat moment,for the very firsttime, I knew exactly what Ethelred had been playing at.

  The silly tosser.

  Twenty-seven

  All that afternoon and most of that evening I tried phoning Ethelred’s number over and over again. Somewhere in Sussex a phone rang in an empty room and stopped.Then it rang again and stopped again. Then it rang. I am sure the neighbours loved it, but into the life of every Sussex village a little rain must fall.

  It was almost one o’clock in the morning when the phone was finally picked up and somebody said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ethelred,you tart, I’ve been trying to phone you all day’

  ‘I’ve only just got back from Scotland.’

  ‘Well, you took your sodding time.’

  ‘Possibly Look, is this urgent?’

  ‘No, I always phone people in the small hours for a casual chat, dickhead.’ It’s not only Swiss banks that can do irony. Bearing in mind that I should have been asleep just then, I was not doing it too badly, either.

  ‘Well, what is it then?’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Generally or specifically?’

  ‘I need to stop you making the biggest mistake of your life.’

  There was a pause and then Ethelred said, ‘I’ve got a plane to catch.’

  ‘In that case I’m coming right over.’