Cat Among the Herrings (11 page)

‘May I interrupt you, Elsie?’

‘No, Tuesday, you may not.’

‘I’ve come to restock your chocolate drawer.’

‘Technically that doesn’t count as an interruption. Go ahead.’

‘Have you thought about my suggestion for a standard rejection letter?’

‘I’ve just done one.’

I showed it to her. She quibbled, as I knew she would. I listened for a bit.

‘I’ve said I wish them every success,’ I replied. ‘I have given them my advice, which is worth its weight in chocolate.’

‘I’ll write you a proper one,’ she said.

‘This is a proper one.’

‘It’ll be on your desk in the morning.’

‘Anything else?’ I asked. I think I put more sarcasm into ‘anything’ rather than ‘else’ but frankly both words were pretty much off the scale.

‘Yes,’ said Tuesday. ‘You should cut down on chocolate. It’s not good for you. I’ll bring some fruit in tomorrow. What sort do you like?’

‘The fruit of the cocoa tree,’ I said. ‘And if I wanted a wife, I’d marry Ethelred.’

‘I’ll get some apples then,’ said Tuesday.

And she was gone before I could point out that there are big health and safety concerns about apples. Just check out Genesis if you don’t believe me.

The phone rang. I answered it, as you do.

‘Don’t lecture me, Ethelred,’ I said. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

There was a rather nervous pause, then Ethelred said: ‘I’ve been thinking. Do you have Sophie’s mobile number?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Because I had.

‘Could you ask her a question?’

‘Which question?’

‘I was thinking about the plot of my very first book,’ he said.

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ I said. ‘It was published years ago. Whatever she thinks of it, it’s too late to do much about it.’

‘I don’t mean I want to change it. It’s actually one of my better ones.’

‘I agree your first book was some sort of high watermark in your career.’

‘Just ask Sophie if Tom kept the bill from the museum,’ he said.

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes, that’s it. You don’t remember the plot of my first book do you?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘So you know what I’m getting at?’

‘You bet.’

Thinking about it afterwards, I couldn’t even remember the title of Ethelred’s first book. Still, it wouldn’t take long to phone.

‘Hi, Sophie. Elsie here. How are things?’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Did you find your diet book?’

Sometimes people say things that are so weird that it’s better to ignore them.

‘This may seem an odd question, Sophie, but when you and Tom went to the museum, did he pay?’

‘Yes, bless him. Well, it was his idea.’

‘And, stranger still, could I ask if he kept the receipt?’

‘Yes, he did. I remember that. He gift-aided the entrance fee. He said he could reclaim some tax or something and he folded the receipt away very carefully in his wallet. I remember especially, though, because he did the same thing with the lunch receipt – he checked it very carefully and then folded it neatly in half and put it in his wallet. I asked him if he’d gift-aided that too and he got quite irritable about it. He said he always kept receipts. I suppose some people do. I chuck mine in the bin straight away.’

‘So do I, unless I can claim expenses,’ I said.

‘Martina thought it was funny too.’

‘Martina?’

‘Oh, she was down in Chichester too. I mentioned it to her. Was that it? Your question, I mean.’

‘Apparently,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Fairfax of the Buckfordshire Police will take it from here.’

Later I checked through Ethelred’s books. The first was called
All on a Summer’s Day
. In it Fairfax solves a case
by sitting in his office in Buckford and examining some receipts that formed part of an alibi. He also goes off to the pub, drinks excessively and is rude to his colleagues, but it was obviously the receipt thing that Ethelred was on about. I phoned him back and told him the receipts were safely filed.

‘It was just a hunch,’ he said modestly.

‘So, you don’t need to see the receipts, just to know they still exist?’

‘Precisely.’

‘You mean the receipts are Tom’s alibi?’ I asked.

‘Something like that.’

‘How much like that?’

‘Quite a lot. But I need to do some more checking,’ he said.

He sounded so smug it was a pleasure to drop my small bombshell into the mix.

‘You know Martina – she of the broken nose and a justifiable grievance – was down in Chichester too that day?’

‘Was she?’

‘Sophie let it slip. They’d had a laugh together about Tom keeping the receipts.’

Ethelred was silent for a moment. ‘Josie said she’d seen somebody else in the car with Sophie.’

‘There you are then, they came down together.’

‘I wonder why?’ said Ethelred.

‘Two ex-girlfriends of girlfriend-beater Robin Pagham are around in Sussex on the day he died and you wonder why that should be?’

‘Yes,’ said Ethelred.

‘Because their being there together doesn’t fit in with whatever this theory is that you won’t tell me about?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Please yourself,’ I said. ‘Some of us have proper day jobs to get on with.’

I looked in my chocolate drawer. I’d been rationed to one Mars Bar, one Snickers and some round green and red things that you see in the supermarkets. Somewhere out there the forces of Evil were circling. The world was ganging up on me.

If there’s one thing that really grinds my goat (as my good friend Cat would say) it’s chapters in detective novels where they go over the evidence yet again, trying to work out who the killer is. They sift through all the stuff you already know and add nothing to anything. Pillocks.

Still, I couldn’t help wondering exactly what Ethelred was getting at. I mean, why should Tom need an alibi? He was a good buddy of Robin’s, albeit mildly disapproving of his treatment of women, and his father was an even better friend of even longer standing. Tom was in no way a suspect. He was also completely under his father’s thumb – he’d scarcely risk doing anything that would bring further disgrace on the venerable if slightly impoverished House of Gittings.

Returning to my more plausible theory, Sophie on the other hand was an ex-girlfriend, who by all accounts had been badly treated. And she was in contact with another ex, who’d had her nose broken – for which Robin had got
off relatively lightly. And they had apparently both been around at the relevant time. Had I been there too, I might have joined them in putting drugs in his coffee, driving him to the sailing club and helping to push his boat out to sea in a storm. And how stunningly fitting that the drug they administered should have been Rohypnol. They had been spotted waiting at the sailing club earlier – maybe they’d checked the weather conditions or something. Then, as I saw it, Martina had later gone to the house – two coffee cups, one with just coffee and one with added Rohypnol – then driven Robin down. Sophie by this stage was at the museum, of course. If Tom’s version of events was to be preferred, she had phoned him a day or two before and suggested a day out, as some sort of cover, relying on the fact that he (with his known compulsion for tidiness) would keep the receipts that would show the time they had arrived and the time they had eaten lunch. So, the receipts were sort of relevant, but it wasn’t an alibi for Tom. It was for Sophie, who had accidentally revealed to me that Martina had been with her. A big mistake.

I reckoned I needed to go and see Martina. Half an hour of grilling from me and she’d crack. I’d need to get Tuesday to schedule it in for me. And I’d need to find my trusty tape recorder. I’d run through all of the above points and wait for her to break down and confess.

But I won’t go through it all again now. As I say, I can’t stand all of this recapitulation of stuff. It really gets up my nose.

That and short chapters.

The problem with being a crime writer was that the more Tom tried to divert me from the aftermath of the 1848 murder, the more I felt obliged to look into it. It was unusual, after all, that the death of a member of the family by hanging had somehow acted as a catalyst for the resurgence of the Paghams. A day spent in the library and a little online research revealed that the change in fortunes had been gradual, but that it had actually begun very soon after the murder of John Gittings.

Perceval Pagham had, at the time of the killing, been a labourer on the Gittings’ estate – that had been clearly reported in the accounts of the trial. Yet the 1851 census returns showed him as a farmer and the owner of Greylands Farm, as it was then described. Greylands had been extended in the late nineteenth century, but even in the 1850s, it must have been a substantial house. A little more research showed that he had enlarged the holding in
1875 and 1876. An obituary in the
Chichester Observer
dating from 1902, recorded him as a significant landowner. His daughter had predeceased him, without marrying. His only son, Cecil, became a Justice of the Peace and had five sons of his own – four of whom had died in the trenches in the 1914–18 war. Gawain alone, another Pagham to be named after one of Arthur’s knights, came through it and succeeded his father in 1930. Gawain, too, had been a JP and had been awarded a CBE for some unspecified services to the state. He had made further acquisitions of land in 1935 and 1950, passing on the estate to Robin’s father, Roger, in 1970. Roger had made the final additions to the estate with a further purchase in 1984.

These acquisitions, from first to last, had been mainly from the Gittings family. This in itself was not strange. There is a limited market for small parcels of land. You cannot show up with a trailer and pack ten acres into it and drive away. The most likely purchaser, if you are considering selling a few fields, is the farm next door. The Gittings and Pagham properties had been side by side.

What had induced the Gittings to sell was not clear, but their decline had mirrored the Paghams rise. Early census returns listed them as landowners. I knew that Tom’s father had spent most of his career in the army. The obituary for Tom’s grandfather stated that he was an accountant. His great-grandfather was listed as a smallholder and grain merchant. They were not impoverished but clearly needed to earn their living.

Then I noticed something odd. Each Pagham acquisition coincided with a Gittings death. George had
died in 1875, his eldest son John in 1876, his grandson, also John, in 1935, and so on. It couldn’t be a coincidence. So what was it?

‘No biscuits today?’ asked Josie. ‘I’m amazed you can put that many away and stay as thin as you are.’

‘My guest returned to London a couple of days ago,’ I said.

‘Your agent?’

‘That’s right. Elsie’s my agent. Sorry – I mean she used to be my agent.’

‘So now she just comes down … what? … to eat your biscuits?’

I pocketed my change with a shrug. That seemed a fair summary of our present contractual status. Then, seeing the shop was empty, I asked: ‘Josie, you know the village as well as anyone … Have you ever heard anything about a feud between the Gittings and the Paghams?’

She frowned. ‘Well, like I said, young Tom Gittings played fast and loose with Robin’s fiancée.’

‘I mean earlier – maybe much earlier. You know that a Gittings was murdered by a Pagham back in the 1840s?’

‘A bit before my time.’

‘But you’ve heard about it?’

‘It’s our most famous murder. It’s got its own entry on Wikipedia.’

‘So, did that lead to anything later?’

Josie leant forward, as she often did if she wanted to impart some local gossip.

‘Not really,’ she said, somewhat disappointingly. ‘But I do remember my gran saying something very odd about
them.’ She surveyed the empty shop for a moment then continued: ‘She’d have only been a little girl at the time, but she told me she’d seen Albert Gittings and Cecil Pagham outside the Memorial Hall one time – a couple years after the First War, that would have been. There’d been some sort of event there, opening the hall and commemorating the men who’d been killed. Well, Cecil had lost four sons, hadn’t he? It was only Gawain, who was a bit funny, who’d survived. He’d not been called up for some reason. Anyway, Albert Gittings turns round and says to Cecil, four down and one to go, eh? Now that was a horrible thing to say at any time, and this was just after this event, whatever it was, to commemorate the dead.’

‘What did Cecil say?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Josie with a laugh. ‘Gran never told me that. She just told me what Albert said. She was that shocked – even though she was a mite herself. Four down and one to go. She clearly never forgot it. Did I give you your change?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’d better get back. I need to make a phone call.’

‘Death duties,’ said Elsie, at the other end of the line. ‘It’s obvious. The head of the family dies. They have to sell a few fields to pay the tax. The Paghams are waiting with the cash.’

‘How come it’s always the Gittings who have to sell? Death duties would have hit both families. The Paghams held onto what they had.’

‘You don’t listen to the Archers, do you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’ It was a radio programme I rarely missed.

‘OK. The Gittings are the Grundys – always mismanaging their farm and lurching from crisis to crisis. The Paghams are the Archers, buying up the village bit by bit and getting all the best lines in the script.’

I thought about this. I couldn’t see Derek Gittings mismanaging anything.

‘The problem with that,’ I said, ‘is that there was no inheritance tax back in the 1870s – I’ve checked and there was just succession duty at about one per cent. It would have been an annoyance, but not ruinous. Death duty didn’t come in until 1894 – the first time it would have applied would have been when the grandson, John, died in 1935.’

‘I’m losing track of all these Johns – they do seem to have wanted to keep the memory of the original one alive.’

‘That’s the son of the second John Gittings and the nephew of Albert.’

‘The Albert who wished the Paghams dead?’

‘That’s the one. And why the animosity?’

‘Because a Pagham had killed a Gittings?’ suggested Elsie.

‘Tom doesn’t think so. He reckons John was a victim of Gittings on Gittings violence, with Lancelot Pagham as collateral damage. There was a clear motive too – both Gittings boys were after the same girl and one of them had got her pregnant. George Gittings gave evidence that did for Lancelot and saved his own skin in the process. People must have talked about it.’

‘Well, if it was a known miscarriage of justice, then you’d
have expected the Paghams to have hated the Gittings,’ said Elsie, ‘not the other way round. And it would scarcely have still been going on seventy years later.’

‘Cecil Pagham was the nephew of Lancelot. Albert was the nephew of John Gittings. In one way it was all still pretty close. But I take your point that it’s all the wrong way round. Unless Tom’s mistaken – if the judge was right and Lancelot really
was
the killer, then it makes more sense.’

‘We need more evidence,’ Elsie said. ‘Something that will help make sense of it all.’

But the next bit of evidence I was to unearth would prove to be the oddest yet.