The Herring in the Library
Read The Herring in the Library Online
Authors: L. C. Tyler
To Ann
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither ’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
John Keats,
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’
CONTENTS
One
There is nothing more tiresome, when you are about to expose a murderer, than to discover that you have been wilfully misled by the one person that you had thought you could
trust.
Elsie had, since mid-afternoon, been cheating at
Cluedo,
at first subtly but now with little or no pretence of following the same rules that I was.
‘If,’ I said, ‘you really do have Miss Scarlett’s card in your hand, then remarkably nobody has committed a murder and Dr Black has died in the library of natural
causes.’
Elsie, immune since birth to irony, simply nodded at this self-evident truth. ‘That seems reasonable to me. Natural causes in the library. That also means I win.’ She picked up my
piece (Colonel Mustard) and flicked him back into the box, where he spun for a moment before coming to rest in sad and friendless isolation. The other five pieces, all now happily cleared of any
suspicion of guilt, were allowed to remain in their various locations on the board.
The game was clearly over, but there were one or two minor issues I still needed to clear up. ‘Ignoring for a moment the impossibility of that outcome, why do
you
win, when I said
it first?’
‘You said it ironically. I said it in earnest,’ said Elsie.
Long experience has taught me that the more ridiculous an assertion is, the more difficult it is to argue against it. Unwisely, I persisted.
‘You win only if that’s what the cards say,’ I said, with impeccable male logic. Though I was confident that the cards could not say that, I immediately regretted my generosity
in conceding even this much. Elsie could do a great deal with a very small concession.
Her plump hand was already on the envelope in the middle of the board that concealed the three murder cards. She peeked a little too quickly and put them back. ‘Yes,’ she confirmed,
as if I might really be stupid enough to believe it. ‘Natural causes. You lose.’
‘Except Miss Scarlett is in fact the murderer, isn’t she?’ I said. ‘So when I asked you whether you had Miss Scarlett and you said you had, you were basically lying,
weren’t you?’
Elsie assumed a look of wide-eyed innocence, to which she was not even remotely entitled.
‘I
am
Miss Scarlett,’ she said, as if explaining something that should have been obvious even to me. ‘Look, there’s my piece, in the library, where you put
it.’
‘You have to have the card in order to deny Miss Scarlett is the killer,’ I said.
‘Not if you
are
Miss Scarlett. You could hardly expect Miss Scarlett to admit to the murder and then continue to flounce around the board for the rest of the game as if nothing had
happened. Obviously she would deny it right up to the last. It’s in the rules.’
I wondered if there was a way of continuing the discussion that wouldn’t make me sound silly and pedantic. Probably not. One of Elsie’s roles as my literary agent was, I had learned
long ago, to remind me of my many inadequacies. We had established two or three new ones that afternoon. I doubted there could be any more to discover, but it seemed wiser not to take chances.
Best, then, simply to agree with her that the Fifth Amendment applied to
Cluedo,
and no character could be required to incriminate himself or herself. In any case, I badly needed her to
answer a question that I had asked shortly before.
‘Yes, Ethelred,’ she said when I reminded her. ‘I was listening to every word.’
‘And what was I saying?’ I enquired.
To be fair to her, she didn’t look embarrassed. She simply busied herself switching the cards in the envelope, neatly fitting up the absent Colonel Mustard as the murderer (with the dagger
in the kitchen). ‘You were telling me that Amazon rankings are a plot by the Freemasons, the Jesuits and Dan Brown, and are based not on actual sales but on the dimensions of the Great
Pyramid at Giza.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then you were probably complaining about the multi-squillion-pound advance to that supermodel for her so-called novel. Actually, I know the agent who negotiated the deal and the advance
was scarcely more than your lifetime earnings. And at least ten per cent will have gone to the ghostwriter who really produced it. So, nothing to get excited about there.’
‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Have you actually listened to anything I have said for the past half-hour?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Though, come to think of it, I do remember you unjustly accusing my piece of murder. I’m not sure I have forgiven you for that. In any
case, writers really only have three subjects of conversation, two of which I have covered. So, it has to be the third one, whatever that is.’
‘I was asking you, as my agent, for some advice on my next novel. It’s what you get your fifteen per cent for.’
‘Ethelred, one hundred per cent would not compensate for having to listen to you rabbiting on. I get my fifteen per cent for selling your books to unsuspecting publishers. My advice has to
be free of charge – you couldn’t afford it at market value.’
‘If I can’t work this out, there’ll be nothing to deduct fifteen per cent from.’
‘So third possible topic of conversation – all genre fiction is sadly underrated by critics and the public, and you want to embark on a great literary novel,’ she said, showing
she might have been listening in on the conversation after all.
‘But whenever I sit down at the keyboard, I just get nowhere.’
‘Look,’ said Elsie, patiently, ‘you are a second-rate crime writer.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ said Elsie, equally patiently, ‘you are a third-rate crime writer, occasionally aspiring to the second-rate. Your fingers are used to typing out straightforward
plots – basic characterization, sound accounts of police procedures, accurate descriptions of pubs and dimly lit back alleys – no unreliable narrators, no flashbacks or anything else
that might cause confusion for the sort of person who reads your books. Ask your fingers to produce something swanky and obviously they get worried. They start to question whether this is wise.
They’re good intelligent fingers, those are.’
‘I’d hoped for some sensible advice,’ I said in clarification.
‘Well, why didn’t you say so? My sensible advice is as follows. Don’t confuse your loyal readers by doing something different. You’ll piss them off.’
‘Are you saying that crime-fiction fans are incapable of appreciating good literature?’
‘I’m not talking about
all
crime-fiction fans,’ said Elsie. ‘I’m just talking about . . . well, never mind.’ She patted my hand across the
Cluedo
board. ‘It’s time you wrote another Master Thomas. If you leave it too long between books, people will stop buying them. Don’t forget your readers aren’t as
young as they used to be. You need to get another book out there while they can still remember your name or indeed their own names. Have you checked your Amazon rankings lately?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ I said.
‘If I were you, I’d get down to another historical detective story this evening. After all, there’s no time like the present.’
This made me look at my watch.
‘You know as well as I do – we’re due at Muntham Court in an hour. We’d better get changed.’
‘Changed?’ asked Elsie.
‘Clothes,’ I said.
Elsie pointed to what she was wearing. This summer she had gone a bit peasant for no obvious reason. I’d seen one or two actresses photographed in something similar for the Sunday colour
supplements, but they had known roughly where to stop. Elsie’s costume was sort of Gypsy Rose Lee meets Vivienne Westwood – though it didn’t look as if they had been pleased to
see each other. I’d hoped she had something else in the small bag she had deposited in the hallway of my flat. I was still hoping.
‘Look,
clothes
,’ she said. ‘I am already wearing clothes. I accept that you probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d shown up naked, but I flatter myself others
might.’
‘Didn’t you bring anything else?’
‘Such as? It’s just dinner with your mates in their flat,’ said Elsie.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You said: they live on an estate.’
‘They
own
an estate,’ I said. ‘Muntham Court.’
‘Muntham Court? Still sounds a bit Local Authority to me,’ said Elsie.
‘Sir Robert and Lady Muntham,’ I said, ‘of Muntham Court, in the county of West Sussex. That’s who we are having dinner with.’
‘And who else is on the guest list?’ she asked. ‘Lord Snooty and Bertie sodding Wooster?’
‘Just a few friends,’ I said.
‘For whom I apparently have to dress up?’
‘Black tie,’ I said.
‘You can go on your own.’
‘That would mean you’d miss an opportunity to sneer at my friends,’ I said.
‘Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘I’m sure they won’t mind you as you are. I promise I won’t tell them you’re dressed like that because you thought they lived in a council flat.’
‘No, I can tell them that myself,’ said Elsie. ‘Right. I’ve got time for a nice relaxing bath before I reapply my lipstick, and you’ve got time to write the first
five hundred words of the next Master Thomas. Nothing swanky. Keep it simple. No metafiction. No foreshadowing of events via dubious analogies. And no flashbacks.’
Two
It must have been almost three months before that when I had run into Rob Muntham coming out of the village post office. I had literally bumped into a tall, slightly stooped,
grey-haired figure, who was attempting to enter as I attempted to leave. I was just framing a muttered apology when the man addressed me.
‘Ethelred?’ he said.
I must have looked blank because he repeated himself.
‘Ethelred Tressider, isn’t it? You don’t recognize me, do you? I’m Robert Muntham.’
‘Rob Muntham?’ I said. I had a horrible feeling that I had sounded as though I was correcting him on the subject of his own name, but at university he had never been called
‘Robert’ – he had been ‘Rob’ or, more usually, ‘Shagger’. The new, fuller version of his name seemed to come with the gravitas that he had acquired from
somewhere during the thirty-odd years since I had last seen him. And, thinking about it, he had also sobered up a bit since that last occasion, standing in the middle of the quad singing a song
apparently addressed to a Zulu warrior.
He gave me a tight-lipped smile in response to my mode of address. ‘These days I am, for my sins,
Sir
Robert Muntham.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Congratulations. I read about it in the college magazine.’
‘For services to banking,’ he added.
‘Ah, yes,’ I said again. I wondered if he had really been given a knighthood for his sins. It seemed unlikely, even for a banker. Still, Sir Robert Muntham . . .
It’s strange how some of one’s contemporaries show wholly illusory promise, while others emerge unreasonably and gloriously triumphant. Shagger Muntham was unquestionably in the
latter category. He captained the college rugby team and had narrowly missed a boxing blue. His capacity for beer qualified him as some sort of minor alcoholic deity. He knew all of the words to
‘Eskimo Nell’ and most of the words to ‘The Harlot of Jerusalem’. These things were held, in the college, to be much to his credit. On the other hand, even his closest
friends never claimed to know what subject he was reading. He was the only person I can recall being wildly congratulated on achieving a third-class degree. The party lasted several days and ended
with him standing in the quad . . . No, I think I’ve mentioned that already.