The Liar in the Library

by Simon Brett

  ‘It may not be the same person,’ said Jude, in an attempt at reassurance. ‘All we’ve got to go on is a name that sounds like “Milo”. There are all kinds of other possibilities for—’

  She was interrupted by the ringing of her mobile phone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jude, this is Karla. I’ve just had contact from Lennie. A friend of his reckons he knows where Pawel can be found.’

  Karla parked outside the Crown & Anchor within twenty minutes. Through the front window, Jude saw the Micra arrive and was instantly up and ready. Zosia had made her excuses to Ted Crisp. There was no way she wasn’t going with them.

  The route which Karla drove seemed ominously familiar. From the pub, along the seafront to the West. But she stopped before she reached Fethering Library. Stopped near the shelter Jude had walked past almost exactly a week before.

  It was bitterly cold and the cloud cover was too thick for the moon to penetrate. Karla parked the car facing the sea, so that the headlights outlined the broken-glassed metal framework.

  The three women did not speak; the only sound was their footsteps on the shingle.

  Zosia got there first. As she rounded the corner of the shelter, she let out a cry of almost animal pain.

  Karla and Jude were not far behind. They heard her sobbing as she rushed forward to cradle the emaciated figure on the ground.

  The Micra’s headlights caught gleams from the fresh blood.

  Uncle Pawel was not moving.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As the ambulance bore the old man and his niece off to hospital, Jude and Karla watched its lights dwindling along the seafront.

  The paramedics had confirmed that Uncle Pawel was still alive, but their manner suggested they did not believe that state of affairs would last for long.

  Fortunately, the police who’d been summoned were just an on-duty patrol in a Panda car. They had nothing to do with Detective Inspector Rollins’s investigation and, so far, no connection had been made between the death of Burton St Clair and the attack on Uncle Pawel. Jude doubted whether that situation would continue, but was grateful that all the police asked for from her and Karla were contact details.

  ‘Do you think Pawel’ll make it?’ asked Jude, as they walked towards the Micra.

  The other woman’s expression was dourly sceptical. ‘It doesn’t look likely. I’ve seen a lot of head injuries and his are pretty bad. Might be a case of hoping he doesn’t make it, anyway. I can’t think he’ll have much quality of life after that lot.’

  It was a grim assessment, but Karla had seen too much of the real world to speak anything but the truth. And maybe she was right. Uncle Pawel seemed to have been doing his best to destroy his life. Prolonging it might just be a form of cruelty. If he couldn’t cope while in possession of his faculties, was he likely to do any better when suffering from brain damage?

  When they got back to Woodside Cottage, Jude thanked her for the lift and offered a cup of coffee, but Karla refused. She had to get to Littlehampton for an alcohol self-help group meeting.

  Jude expressed further gratitude for the help she’d been given in finding Uncle Pawel, but could tell it wasn’t being taken in. For Karla, the evening represented another failure. The old man was someone she should have helped, and she hadn’t got there in time to do so.

  As the Micra drew away, Jude started up her garden path, then changed her mind and went to knock on the door of High Tor.

  Any frostiness Carole might have demonstrated that morning quickly melted in the warmth of her curiosity. She couldn’t wait to hear what her neighbour had found out from Di, Nemone and Zosia.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ she asked, as Jude concluded her narrative. ‘Does it mean that Pawel committed the murder?’

  ‘Not the way I see it.’

  ‘But if he had Burton St Clair’s hipflask …’

  ‘We don’t actually know that it was Burton St Clair’s hipflask he had.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Jude.’

  ‘Yes, I agree, it’s very likely, but the hipflask hasn’t been found.’

  Carole snorted. ‘Going back to my question: do you think that Pawel killed Burton St Clair?’

  ‘I really don’t. That murder required a degree of planning that I don’t think the old boy would have been capable of. Anyway, I’m sure he had no connection with Burton. Which means he couldn’t possibly have known about the walnut allergy or any of that stuff.

  ‘No, I think the most likely scenario is that Uncle Pawel, who we know had been in the shelter that Tuesday evening, wandered up to the library, after Burton was dead, and saw the hipflask in the unlocked car. He recognized it might be valuable; maybe he even hoped it still had some booze in it, so he took it. The question is, where the hipflask is now.’

  ‘Presumably it was taken from the old boy by Milosz Gadzinski or his thugs when they beat him up?’

  ‘But why would they beat him up?’

  ‘To get the hipflask. He’d presumably contacted them to say he’d got a valuable silver hipflask and wanted money for it. They went to find him, having decided that they’d take it from him without giving him anything for it. The old man put up a fight. They beat him up.’

  Carole sat back, content with the sequence of her logic, but when Jude didn’t respond, said, ‘Why? Do you have an alternative explanation?’

  ‘I’d prefer to think of the two crimes as connected.’

  ‘They are connected, Jude. By the hipflask. As you say, Pawel must have stolen it from Burton St Clair’s unlocked car, and it was because he had it that he was attacked by Milosz Gadzinski’s gang.’

  ‘What makes you so sure it was them who attacked him?’

  Carole was getting exasperated. ‘Really, Jude, we’re just going round in circles. Milosz Gadzinski’s gang attacked Pawel because he’d told them that he had the hipflask! Come on, do you have an alternative scenario?’

  ‘Yes. Whoever murdered Burton St Clair knew that he – or she – had contaminated the hipflask with chopped walnuts or walnut oil or walnut extract. His or her plan worked. Burton died. But the next bit of his or her plan was to remove the only piece of incriminating evidence – the hipflask – from the BMW and destroy it … possibly by throwing it into the sea.’

  Carole caught on. ‘So you’re suggesting that the murderer came back to the car and found no sign of the hipflask?’

  ‘Exactly. Which might have been good news or bad news, depending on who had got the wretched thing. But if our murderer found out for certain who did have the hipflask … well, that person immediately represented a danger. The person now in possession might even have witnessed the murderer doctoring the hipflask earlier in the evening. The person, once they had been identified, therefore had to be eliminated.’

  ‘And Pawel was attacked by the same person who killed Burton St Clair?’

  ‘That’s the way I see it, Carole.’

  ‘Hm. So who do we talk to next?’

  ‘I think there’s more information to be got out of Steve Chasen.’

  From their previous encounter, Jude remembered that God’s gift to science fiction worked weekend night-time shifts at Sainsbury’s on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She also remembered that he was ‘one of those people who can’t go into a pub and not have a bevvy.’ It therefore seemed a safe assumption that he might agree to meeting for a drink in the Crown & Anchor on a Tuesday evening.

  So it proved.

  She could hardly believe that only a few hours had elapsed since she had left the pub with Zosia. The shock of discovering Pawel’s bloodied body made that departure feel like a very long time ago.

  Steve Chasen was dressed in Doc Martens and different camouflage patterns – clearly, he had a whole wardrobe of them at home – and he turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a lager drinker. Having introduced Carole, Jude went to the bar and ordered a pint of Stella and two large Sauvignon Blancs. In the absence of Zosia, Ted Crisp served them, but that was no hardship.
On a cold January Tuesday, the Crown & Anchor had very few customers.

  When they were settled with their drinks, Jude said formally, ‘It’s very good of you to agree to meet us, Steve.’

  ‘No problem. Anything I can do to help.’ There was caution in his voice. Jude got the feeling he’d agreed to meet so readily because he wanted to assess how much they knew, and whether they had found out about information he had been concealing.

  ‘When we talked last Friday,’ Jude went on, ‘you said you’d never met Burton St Clair before he came to the library on Tuesday.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that your memory on that may be faulty.’ This from Carole, who was very good at playing Bad Cop when required.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Jude talked to a woman called Nemone Coote.’

  He shook his head. ‘Never heard the name – and it’s not the kind you’d forget, is it?’

  Jude took over. ‘Nemone Coote was Centre Director at the Wordway Trust house called Blester Combe where you attended a crime writing course some fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Oh God, yes. I do vaguely remember her. Big butch lady, looked like a lezzie but was actually straight.’

  ‘What a good memory you have when it’s jogged,’ Carole observed acidly.

  ‘I can’t be expected to have instant recall of people I met fifteen years ago,’ Steve Chasen whined in self-justification.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Jude, ‘but maybe another jog to your memory might help you recall a fellow participant on the course?’

  His brow furrowed. ‘We are talking a long time ago.’

  ‘Burton St Clair was on that same course.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Back then he would have been calling himself Al Sinclair.’

  ‘Oh. Blimey!’ He struck his head with the heel of his hand. ‘I do remember someone called Al. It’s all first names on Wordway courses, so I’d never have known his surname. But now you mention it, yes. I seem to remember he used to write crime novels under a pseudonym and paid for them to be vanity-published, if we’re talking about the same person. And are you telling me that guy became Burton St Clair?’

  As a piece of acting it would have been a shoo-in for a Golden Raspberry Award. Carole and Jude looked at him sceptically.

  ‘The fact that you had met Burton St Clair before,’ Carole observed, ‘does put rather a different complexion on the events of last week, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ he said aggressively.

  ‘I think you do, Steve,’ said Jude. ‘Nemone Coote told me that Burton was always going on about his walnut allergy. No one who’d been on that course could have avoided knowing about it. And you—’

  ‘Oh, no.’ He held up his hands to stem her flow. ‘I see where this is going. If you’re trying to shift the blame for murdering the bastard on to me, then you are very definitely on the wrong track.’

  ‘Have the police interviewed you yet?’ asked Carole.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because when we spoke on Friday,’ Jude recalled, ‘you said they’d left a message asking you to make contact.’

  ‘Which I duly did the next day. They said they might need to talk to me at some point, but I haven’t heard anything since.’

  ‘Hm.’

  There was panic in his eyes. ‘Why, you’re not planning to contact them about me?’

  ‘No, no,’ Jude soothed.

  ‘It wouldn’t be our place to do that,’ said Carole piously. ‘On the other hand, it is rather interesting how much information you have withheld.’

  ‘I haven’t withheld anything! Like I say, the police haven’t even spoken to me.’

  ‘No, but you’ve withheld information from Jude. You’ve lied to Jude, in fact. Lied about not knowing Burton St Clair before last Tuesday, lied—’

  ‘Look, I told you I didn’t know it was the same bloke!’

  ‘Lied about not knowing he had a walnut allergy.’

  ‘If I want to lie, I’d have thought that’s up to me – and certainly if the only people I’m lying to are a couple of nosy old biddies like you two. I haven’t lied to the police. If they question me, I’ll tell them the truth.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Carole drily.

  ‘But I still don’t like the way you’re trying to pin this murder on me.’

  ‘We’re not trying to pin anything on you,’ said Jude. ‘We’re just trying to get to the truth.’

  Carole picked up the line of thought. ‘And to do that, it makes sense that we should look for someone who was antagonistic towards the murder victim, who knew about his walnut allergy, who knew he always carried a hipflask, who—’

  ‘Stop this, will you! Just bloody stop it! You’re sounding like something out of a Golden Age detective story.’

  ‘Oh, you know about them, do you?’

  ‘Yes. When the library’s Writers’ Group was going, we had a session on Golden Age crime fiction. Bloody load of nonsense. That’s not proper writing.’

  No, we’ve already established, thought Jude, the only stuff you regard as ‘proper writing’ is your own. But she didn’t say anything.

  ‘Did you just do this Golden Age session amongst members of the group?’ asked Carole. ‘Or did you have an outside speaker?’

  ‘We had that batty Yank from the University of Clincham.’

  ‘Nessa Perks?’

  ‘That’s her. She was at the talk on Tuesday, and all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jude. ‘And what did she talk about in this Golden Age session?’

  ‘Oh, some cobblers about old-fashioned whodunits being full of good ideas for real-life murders. She said she knew a Golden Age book that would tell anyone how to commit the perfect murder.’

  ‘Did she tell you the book’s title?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Yes, I remember it well. It was Best Served Cold. By G. H. D. Troughton.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  On their return from the Crown & Anchor, the two women parted at their respective front gates, agreeing to make contact early on the Wednesday morning to see where they should go next with their investigation.

  When she got inside Woodside Cottage, Jude felt a wave of exhaustion sweep through her. She knew it was delayed shock from the discovery of Uncle Pawel in the shelter. That thought reminded her of his plight. Was it possible that he was still clinging on to life in Worthing Hospital? She texted Zosia to send support and ask for a bulletin, but got no immediate response.

  On other occasions Jude would have relaxed herself with a hot bath, candles and essential oils, but that evening she felt too wiped out. Pausing only to pour herself a massive Scotch, she went upstairs and collapsed into bed.

  Next door at High Tor, Carole was wakeful. Though they’d agreed they could make no more investigative progress till the morning, Carole wasn’t so sure. There must be something she could do. And, still miffed about her unequal participation in the case, she determined to do it.

  She felt only a token pang of guilt about resorting to Amazon rather than waiting to use the West Sussex library service. It was an e-book she wanted, after all. She wouldn’t be able to get that from Fethering Library.

  Her search was surprisingly easy. Yes, Best Served Cold was listed. And yes, it was available as an e-book. In fact, it turned out that, with the revival of interest in Golden Age crime fiction, a lot of long-lost gems from the time were readily available.

  It was a matter of moments for Carole to have the text downloaded on to her laptop.

  She settled down to read for the rest of the evening – or into the night, if that seemed to be necessary. And with the opening paragraphs of the book she was instantly back in the Golden Age.

  Pre-prandial drinks were taken in the library of Threshton Grange. With Dexter Hogg as his host, Sir Gervaise Montagu anticipated being introduced to the usual collection of City idlers and downright bounders who people the weekend parties of the les
ser gentry. His expectation was not disappointed. There were few gentlemen present who had been to the right schools, but those who had must subsequently have let down the high principles of those academic establishments and the basic tenets of good form. Even with ladies present, most of the conversations Montagu overheard were on the vulgar subject of money.

  Such certainly was the theme of Count Alexander Frisch, to whom Dexter Hogg introduced him with almost fawning enthusiasm. As they shook hands, Montagu caught the distinct whiff of brandy on the man’s breath. Since the Threshton Grange butler Pinke had yet to begin serving drinks, this meant Frisch must keep a secret cache of the French elixir in his bedroom. Having already marked the man down as a bounder, Montagu now suspected he might be dealing with a cad as well.

  ‘We have only to cast an idle eye around this room,’ said Frisch, ‘to see that we are among men of the world, whose brains are in tune with the mechanisms of international finance.’ The man’s accent was German, something that did not endear him any further to the bulldog spirit of the amateur sleuth. ‘Monarchs may tumble, shares go down to cats’ meat prices, but the gentlemen in this room will still be turning a profit.’

  ‘If you would choose to call them gentlemen,’ murmured Sir Gervaise Montagu …

  Carole was quickly realizing the disadvantages of reading an e-book. For the kind of search she was making, it would have been much easier to handle an old-fashioned volume made of paper. On that she could have annotated, marked up, flipped back to compare references, hurried through the irrelevant bits. E-book technology did not allow that, so she had to read the whole text.

  Which, in this case, wasn’t actually too much of a hardship.

  The scene that greeted Montagu in the billiard room was one of abject horror. At the end away from the table, men in evening dress stood in a circle of silence. On the brows of some the sweat of excess glistened, but their conviviality was no more. At their centre lay Count Alexander Frisch. One hand still gripped desperately at the billiard cue, the other at the chalk he had been about to apply to its tip. His thick-lipped mouth was twisted into a rictus of surprise and agony.