Cat Among the Herrings (15 page)

I wasn’t sure which flower bed I’d parked on last time, so I just steered the mini onto the nearest one available, avoiding the daffodils that seemed to have sprung up everywhere.

In the middle distance I could see somebody working away with a spade, so I wandered round to the side of the house. Catarina was digging the vegetable patch. She worked efficiently and methodically, only partially hampered by the fact that her high heels were sinking into the mud. She paused, swore briefly in what I assumed was her native language, then set to again.

‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’ I asked.

She looked up at me. ‘Is spade there if you want to help.’

I walked over and fetched the second spade, which had been thrust into the earth a short way off.

‘OK, Cat, what do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘Dig,’ she said. ‘Then put cocaine in pile by lilac and heroin in pile by azaleas.’

I noticed that there were already two neat little piles on the lawn – packets wrapped in oilcloth and stained with mud.

‘Are you sure this is the right time to harvest heroin?’ I asked. ‘I’m sure my old man used to leave it in the ground until Easter. Said it had a better flavour.’

‘We dig now. By Easter police come back with sniffing dogs.’

Though I like it to remain my little secret most of the time, I do know how to use a spade, having helped my dad on his smallholding many years ago, before I worked out that it was easier to buy it all ready-chopped in plastic bags at Waitrose. After I’d removed a foot or so of soil I struck drugs – the spade made contact with the outer covering of another package.

‘Careful!’ Catarina called across to me, ‘don’t tear fabric. If bag leak, heroin not good for cabbages.’

I dug more carefully and gathered in a fine crop of narcotics. ‘There must be thousands of pounds-worth of stuff here,’ I said. ‘Did you grow it all from seed?’

‘Robin buries it,’ said Catarina. ‘He thinks I not see, but women take an interest in their husbands’ gardens. Is natural.’

‘So, he wasn’t just bringing it ashore, then?’

‘He go out in boat. Bring back packages. Sometimes men come to collect. Sometimes he hide here if not safe to collect straight away. When Robin die, much drug in garden. Too much drug. Police come to house and search. They find nothing. But I think – next time may search garden. So I phone gang boss.’

‘He’s in the Yellow Pages?’

‘This is your irony?’

‘No, I’m genuinely curious. Life is full of surprises.’

‘Is that your irony?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not Yellow Pages. I have number already.’

‘As you do.’

‘Police catch some smugglers. They bring photographs to me and say do I know them? Of course I do not say it – do police think I am some sort idiot girl? – but I know them. And I know who they work for. So, I phone him. I say get your ass round here, moron, or police take all your drugs. He come tonight with white van and man with AK47.’

‘Is this package heroin or cocaine?’ I asked.

Catarina felt it briefly. ‘Cocaine, obviously,’ she said.

‘I’ll put it by the lilac tree, then,’ I said.

Later, over coffee and yummy cakes, Catarina said: ‘Maybe you not tell Ethelred about heroin.’

‘You think he might not approve?’

‘I think not.’

‘I agree. He wouldn’t grass you up, but knowing that he had condoned a felony would trouble him, poor thing. He would lose sleep. Now that the drugs have gone, by the way, do you think that the stories of ghosts in your garden will also stop?’

‘You think I spread ghost stories to keep peasants away from vegetable patch?’

‘Not if you say you spread the rumours for some other reason. Do you mind if I help myself to another cake or
two by the way? You can’t get these in London – or at least, I can’t.’

‘You have secretary?’

‘I have an assistant.’

‘You must get her to go out and buy. I give you address of good baker.’

‘What an excellent idea. I’ll do that. Digging certainly gives you an appetite. Did you hear, by the way, that they’d dug up a body in the Herring Field?’

‘Old body. Just bones.’

‘Ethelred thinks it’s an ancestor of Tom Gittings. Do you know why Robin didn’t buy the Herring Field when it was offered to him?’

‘No, but Field is useless. I wonder if he wants field to bury stuff in – much better than garden – police not look there – but maybe too close to path. People walk there and see. That man, Whitelace. He is always there. Watching.’

‘Colonel Gittings apparently said that Robin was the only person it was worth selling the field to. Colonel Gittings wouldn’t have been involved in drugs too?’

‘I think colonel is like Ethelred. Not take drugs.’

‘True, it was only a thought. Maybe he just meant that only Robin had land adjoining it. I know what else I wanted to ask you: did you know somebody named Martina Blanch?’

‘She girlfriend of Robin’s. They have fight. But she come back.’

‘She visited Robin after they broke up?’

‘Yes. Once. Maybe twice. I do not know how often. You cannot watch your man all the time. You try, of
course, but is not possible. Even with CCTV. I say to Robin, you not see that woman again. She on make. You screw her again and I kill her.’

‘But you didn’t kill her,’ I said.

‘Not even acid,’ said Catarina tolerantly. ‘I go fetch more cake.’

‘You could have saved yourself a journey,’ I said to Elsie. ‘There’s nothing to investigate. Robin died when he was smuggling heroin.’

‘Catarina doesn’t think it’s the drug smugglers.’

I smiled. ‘Why, does she know them personally?’

‘A bit,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I joked. ‘She’s got their phone number or something?’

‘It’s probably in the Yellow Pages,’ Elsie said enigmatically. ‘Don’t you think it’s interesting, though, about Martina?’

‘That she kept in touch with Robin? Yes, I suppose so. But she’d already said that she no longer bore him any ill will. Catarina clearly saw her off.’

‘She stood to inherit a lot of money if Robin died without a will.’

‘But he did make a will,’ I said. ‘He left his money to
Catarina. Then he died smuggling drugs. He wasn’t killed by Martina or Derek Gittings or Sophie or Barry Whitelace or anyone else in the village.’

‘Your problem, Ethelred, is that you lack imagination.’

‘I thought that, as a writer, imagination was one thing that I did have.’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ said Elsie, ‘but your problem is that your books are all very similar – I mean that they have the same stock characters and standard plots, continually working the same theme of a mysterious death that could only have been committed by a closed group of between six and twelve suspects, all of equal suspectability. Their motives are invariably ones that Agatha Christie would have recognised and had, in many cases, already rejected as too improbable. So, imagination? No, it’s not your strong suit.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘when you say “don’t take this the wrong way”, you mean that there is a right way to take all that?’

‘It is offered in the spirit of honest, constructive criticism. You probably haven’t had much of that lately.’

‘There are some advantages in not having an agent,’ I said.

‘But very few,’ said Elsie. ‘As for your last agent … that Janet person.’

‘Janet Francis,’ I said.

‘Precisely. That Janet person, as she is better known in the book trade. Completely wrong for you.’

‘I liked her,’ I said.

‘Well, you slept with her, so obviously you did. She only wanted you for your body.’

‘Do you think so?’ I said.

‘You’re right,’ said Elsie. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea why she wanted you. Except to steal you from the excellent agency that you were then contracted to. The one that had nurtured your career since you were a baby.’

‘Not quite since I was a baby.’

‘Trust me,’ said Elsie, ‘you were a baby. It’s a shame that my list of authors is full to bursting or I would suggest you wrote to me begging to come back. But sadly it would be pointless.’

‘You were going to take Tom Gittings,’ I said. ‘Your books can’t be completely full.’

‘An exceptional talent,’ said Elsie.

‘And I’m not?’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way …’ said Elsie.

‘OK, I get the picture,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I don’t need an agent.’

‘All writers need an agent,’ said Elsie. ‘But some need an agent more than others. You fall into the extreme and very needy end of the spectrum.’

‘But you don’t have room for me, anyway.’

‘Let me reconsider that. Hmmm. Do I need an author who is high-maintenance and whose pathetic book sales will bring in microscopic amounts of commission for the agency? Nope. I’ve got lots of them already.’

‘Thank you for reconsidering,’ I said. ‘I’m grateful.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Elsie. ‘Would you like me to send you a letter confirming that in writing?’

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’d better go out and buy some biscuits if you’re staying.’

I noticed Tom’s car parked outside the shop, so I was not surprised to find him inside.

We exchanged the usual greetings, then I said: ‘Are the police keeping you informed of progress in your field? Will you go ahead with the test drilling when they’ve finished their investigations?’

Tom looked around cautiously. ‘Some time ago, before Robin died but after he’d made it clear he didn’t want the field, Dad was approached by a company that wanted to put down a drill hole or two to see if there was any oil shale down there. They’re trying to build up a picture of the whole area. They were willing to pay us for allowing them to drill. Later Dad went off the idea, but we’d signed the contract so the planning application went ahead. We’ve no intention of doing anything more than the test drilling. It’s all pretty small-scale – nothing like as big as most of the other sites. Fortunately we’ve managed to avoid the demonstrations they’ve had elsewhere.’

‘At least they discovered your ancestor,’ I said.

Tom shook his head. ‘We’ve had the results back. Not related to me in any way.’

‘So, it isn’t George?’

‘It can’t be.’

‘How odd, I was convinced that was who it was. The year was right. The place was right. It all fitted in with the rest of the story.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

‘Yes, I am a bit. You don’t think … It isn’t possible that Barry Whitelace just planted a few random bones down there to hold up the drilling?’

‘If he was going to fake it, he’d have faked Bronze Age,
not Victorian. Anyway, I doubt if he could have fooled the police pathologists. They’d know recently dug ground when they saw it. You were pretty certain it was going to be George?’

‘Yes, but it can’t be, can it? I’m as sorry for you as anyone – it would have been quite a good twist in the tale. Elsie is down, by the way, in case you need to speak to her about your book.’

‘Yes, she emailed to say she was coming.’

‘Did she?’

‘We just need to finalise the contract.’

‘You’re definitely signing with her, then?’

‘Absolutely. If she’ll take me. Who wouldn’t? Every writer needs an agent.’

A feeling flooded over me, a bit like homesickness, though West Wittering was now my home as much as anywhere ever had been. It was a sort of emptiness – the chill you feel, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, on a summer evening that sends you hurrying back into the house for a pullover – the realisation, on waking up, that it is the last day of the holidays – opening the door of your flat and then remembering that there is nobody there to greet you because your wife left you the previous week to go and live with your best friend. It was all of those things.

‘Are you OK, Ethelred?’ Tom asked.

‘OK? Yes, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Absolutely fine.’

Tom was wrong about one thing. The following day demonstrations started. For about a week television vans squeezed down Ellanore Lane to film the small group of protestors who had been bussed in from London. One or
two locals joined the protest, including Barry Whitelace, briefly one afternoon. Then the signs were taken down, and the oil company that had planned to drill there announced an indefinite postponement. The field was left with a mound of bare earth where the body had been removed, but with the birdsong and the wind in the trees unchanged.

I often walked out in that direction now. The field, as I say, looked no different, but what I knew about it drew me back over and over again. There in 1848, a man had killed his brother. There in 1875 somebody had been buried at the dead of night (when else could they have done it?) with lanterns giving out just enough yellow light for the gravediggers to work. And over the years it had, for I believed the tale that I had read, become a millstone round the necks of the Gittings family, in a way that I still did not understand. How odd that, when they had sold almost everything else, they clung to this one boggy, reed-clogged bit of marsh, miles from their house or any other land that they owned.

I saw Barry Whitelace there only once, on a cold blowy morning, when the sun had only partially melted the overnight frost, leaving the reeds standing stiff and brittle amongst the withered foliage.

I asked how he was.

‘Bearing up,’ he said. ‘The funeral’s next Tuesday. Eleven o’clock, if you can make it.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Won’t be many there. Jean … she fell ill you see quite soon after we arrived … didn’t get out that much towards the end … her sister’s coming from Margate. David’s in Wisconsin, of course.’ He fell silent leaving me to speculate
on who David was. The ‘of course’ suggested I ought to know, so I couldn’t really ask.

‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

‘At least they’re leaving this alone for a bit.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You don’t know who could tell me about the past ownership of the field – I mean who sold it to whom and when? And why it might have been transferred?’

‘Derek Gittings, since he’s the current owner.’

‘And if I didn’t think I’d get much out of him?’

‘You could try their lawyers – Chettle and Smallbrook. They’re in Chichester. They’d have something, I’m sure. They were the Paghams’ lawyers too. I know because Robin threatened to sue me for slander.’

‘I’ll give them a call,’ I said.