The Herring in the Library (23 page)

Jane Smith shrugged. ‘I didn’t kill Robert. Gerald and I were together the whole time that evening.’

‘That’s not true. You had the opportunity. You and Gerald were briefly separated when everyone was looking round the house. You were both alone for long enough that
either of you could—’

She shook her head vehemently.

‘Hang on a bit!’ I said. ‘What you’re really worried about is that Gerald could have done it, aren’t you? You’re worried that he could have
found out about the abortion and decided to get his revenge.’

‘No,’ she said. But her theory that married bosses and young attractive secretaries could go off to conferences together without arousing much comment was really far
more convincing.

‘If it’s any comfort,’ I said, ‘I don’t think it was Gerald. Probably.’

She looked at me gratefully for a moment, then sniffed and said: ‘You don’t still have that hanky, do you?’

I checked it out and told her she could keep it.

It struck me that what I should do next was go to Gerald Smith’s office and ask him one or two pertinent questions. I had taken the precaution of furnishing myself with
the address before leaving London. I parked my car in the centre of town and walked the hundred yards or so from the nearest parking space to a glass-and-concrete edifice, part of which his firm
occupied. I was standing in front of it, trying to decide whether to use the same successful tactics that I had with Jane Smith, when the front door opened and Ethelred staggered out with a
goggle-eyed expression on his face. It wasn’t that much of a coincidence, in the sense that I knew he had plans to talk to Gerald Smith. Still, it was good timing and I thought he’d be
pretty impressed by what I had managed to discover.

When I called him, however, he just looked uncomprehendingly at me, then he blinked a couple of times and said: ‘Elsie! Thank God you’re here. You won’t
believe what I’ve just found out. I still don’t quite believe it myself

So we went off to a cafe and he told me.

Twenty-four

The train journey back from London gave me time to ponder things. Annabelle had, when you thought about it, no motive at all for killing Robert. Nor did I agree with Elsie that
she had behaved oddly over the discovery of the passage. It seemed to me that Annabelle had been as surprised as I was when the panel had slid to one side – more surprised perhaps.
Increasingly I felt that Elsie’s views on Annabelle were somewhat harsh and unfair. She was allowing her personal feelings to get in the way of more mature judgement.

The more I thought, too, the more I agreed with Clive Brent that it was John O’Brian who had the shakiest story. He had been around the whole evening, but had been working alone. He would
have been able, from the garden, to see Robert enter the brightly lit library. He had an unrequited passion for Annabelle. And, if Clive was right about the payments to him, he seemed to have some
strange hold over the family. After I had spoken to Annabelle I needed to speak to him.

I drove straight from Worthing station back to Muntham Court. The front door remained closed and unyielding as before, but this time my walk to the back of the house was not
entirely in vain.

John O’Brian was busy putting tools away in the garden shed.

‘She’s gone off somewhere,’ he said, arranging some forks against the wall.

He did not seem entirely happy. I pointed this out.

‘I am no longer in Her Ladyship’s employment,’ he said. ‘As of this morning. She has reluctantly let me go. I came back this afternoon to pick up a few things and leave
this place tidy for whoever replaces me. Once I’ve done that, which will be very soon indeed, I’m out of here for good.’

‘Fired?’ I asked.

‘I’d have said so,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been told to leave the premises forthwith and that any money owing to me will be sent on.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘I hoped you could tell me,’ he said. ‘I do, however, have a bottle of good Irish whiskey hidden away in that corner. I could take it with me, or we could drink it here. So,
why don’t we have a chat and see whether we can work it all out?’

Apart from a comprehensive selection of clean and well-cared-for tools, a small tractor for cutting the grass, and a range of killers of animal and vegetable life (in liquid and solid form), the
shed contained a couple of old garden chairs and a small wooden table. John O’Brian went to a cupboard marked ‘
POISONS
’ and took out a half-full bottle of Bushmills and
two drinking vessels.

‘So,’ he said, as he swilled his whiskey thoughtfully in a Thomas the Tank Engine mug, ‘it would seem this is my farewell drinks party. Her Ladyship’s not here to make a
speech, but she made a brief one this morning and I’ll have to make do with that. Between you, me and that mower over there, I’ve had enough of this place anyway, but I was just
wondering whether you had even the faintest idea what I’m supposed to have done.’

‘Not what you’ve done nor what I’ve done,’ I said. ‘I too am apparently off the case, as far as the murder investigation is concerned.’

‘Women!’ he said, and raised Thomas the Tank Engine to his lips. I did the same with my Flopsy Bunnies tea cup (saucer missing).

‘People think you were sleeping with Annabelle,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s the truth anyway,’ he said.

‘Were you?’ I asked, surprised.

‘I suppose, thinking about it, sleeping was one of the few things we didn’t do – but we did have sex all the time. I can’t even say we went to bed together – to use
another euphemism – this place was as good as any for her. Then there was this funny passageway that leads from the billiard room to the library . . .’

‘You knew about that?’

‘That’s where she really liked doing it. Preferably with himself in the library a few feet away from us and completely unaware, though he occasionally must have thought the mice were
having a pretty good time behind the oak panelling.’

‘You weren’t . . . you weren’t in the passage the evening of the dinner party?’

‘I was nowhere near it. It’s funny though. That afternoon Annabelle suggested she might slip away from the party and join me for some fun in the secret passageway. She said I should
wait for her there.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘I thought she was joking. In any case, I wasn’t going to wait around for hours in the dark on the off chance. It wouldn’t have been the first time.’

‘But she might have thought you were there?’

‘You’ll have to ask her.’

It was of course very unlikely that Annabelle would have made any such arrangement. I shrugged and said: ‘Annabelle thinks that the murderer might have escaped that way.’

‘Does she? How would an intruder have known about the passage, then?’

‘Who did know?’

‘Well, Annabelle and me, as you will gather. Gill Maggs – Annabelle liked to have the passage clean, even if she was planning dirty work there.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Annabelle preferred to keep it all on a need-to-know basis, for obvious reasons. Of course, I’ve no idea who needed to know. It might well have been half the male population of West
Sussex.’

‘I think that’s a little unfair.’

‘Is it? Fine – then let’s say it was just Annabelle, me and Gill Maggs.’

‘That means you would have been one of a small number of people who would have known how to get out of the library, leaving it apparently locked,’ I said. ‘Your movements are
also unaccounted for round about the time of the murder.’

‘So, are you saying I’m the killer, then?’ he asked, topping up my Flopsy Bunnies cup with a generous slug of golden spirit. ‘That’s a little harsh in view of my
hospitality.’

‘Don’t you think you have an opportunity and a motive?’

‘What motive?’

‘You wanted Robert dead so that you could marry Annabelle.’

‘Hang on – who said anything about marriage? Look, I’ve worked in a few big houses over the years. This isn’t the first time the lady of the manor has taken a fancy to
the rough son of the soil in her employ. It happened to me more often when I was younger, but neither then nor now did anyone mention making it a permanent position. Anyway, I’d seen how she
treated Sir Robert – not a great inducement to form a permanent relationship. If he hadn’t died, I might have stayed around a bit longer – Her Ladyship was paying me better money
than I’ve had anywhere else. But I’d nothing to gain from his death.’

‘Why did she pay you so much?’

He laughed. ‘I suppose she thought Sir Robert had stacks of money and she might as well throw it around.’

‘But he doesn’t have stacks of money?’

‘Lately I got the impression not. She didn’t really confide in me much. I was only staff – just like Gill.’

‘Gillian Maggs has vanished.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Gone to Barbados.’

‘So they tell me.’

‘You don’t believe it?’

John O’Brian pulled a face. ‘It’s not cheap, that sort of thing. Sir Robert and Annabelle – they were always going there. I can’t see the Maggs family taking off
for Barbados at short notice.’

‘What if they were threatened?’ I asked. ‘What if they needed to get away?’

‘It’s still not an obvious place to go, is it? And if I were running scared, I wouldn’t tell people where I was going – not the real place anyway.’

‘Could Clive Brent have known about the passage?’

‘Annabelle could have told him, I suppose,’ said John O’Brian. ‘He also had a motive.’

‘He was in love with Annabelle?’ I asked.

‘Love? We’re into euphemism territory here again, aren’t we? But he had a perfectly good motive apart from that. Sir Robert had stitched him up badly. He’d destroyed his
career. That might be enough for some people to start thinking about murder.’

‘Of course, there’s also the stranger in the blue suit. You saw him.’

John O’Brian looked very uncomfortable. ‘You’d better talk to Clive Brent about that too,’ he said. ‘He’s the one who really saw him – so he says
anyway.’

‘What do you mean “really saw him”?’

‘Look – Annabelle asked me to do it, right? She told me that Clive Brent had seen this guy hanging around that evening, but that the police wouldn’t take it seriously if Brent
was the only witness. So she got me to agree I’d say I’d seen him too. I felt a real fool telling you about him, when I’d never seen a thing. But it seemed harmless enough to say
I’d glimpsed the same guy – after all, if Clive Brent was that sure, what harm was there?’

‘So that was it – no real explanation – she just told you to do it?’

He smiled. ‘I’m used to it. You’d be amazed how good I am at taking orders. Now, could those Flopsy Bunnies of yours do with another slug of the hard stuff? I’m not
planning to take the bottle away with me and I apparently won’t be coming back to this bar again.’

Twenty-five

I knew that Clive Brent now occupied a small cottage in the grounds of the boarding school of which he was bursar. It was within walking distance of Muntham Court, which
bearing in mind the amount of whiskey I had drunk, was just as well.

The children I encountered thought that it was only mildly odd that a strange man smelling strongly of alcohol was looking for their bursar on a Monday evening. They were very helpful and I
found the cottage without too much trouble – a two-storey building, scarcely wider than its Gothic front door, and situated close to what seemed to have been the stables of the main
building.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, when he had responded to my knocking. ‘You’d better come in, whatever it is you want. Have you been drinking?’

‘With John O’Brian. Is it that obvious?’

‘You are surrounded by an almost visible haze of Irish whiskey. What can I do for you?’

‘The investigation . . .’ I noticed I was having difficulty pronouncing that word. ‘The
search
is getting complex.’

‘I’ll get you another drink then. I’ve only got beer, I’m afraid. Is that OK? Just keep talking. I’ll fetch a couple from the fridge.’

He seated me in a chair in the ground-floor sitting-room-cum-dining-room-cum-kitchen. Upstairs, I guessed, there would be room for a bedroom and a small bathroom. It was one of the few houses I
have ever seen that made my flat look big.

‘The police,’ I said, ‘say that it must be suicide because there was no way out of the locked library. But it transpires there is a secret passage.’

‘So Annabelle says.’ Clive shut the fridge door with his foot and carried two bottles over to the sink to open them.

‘Did you know about the passage?’

‘Not until Annabelle told me yesterday.’

‘She never mentioned it before?’

‘No.’ He handed me the opened bottle and a glass.

‘Not the sort of thing that a total stranger would have known about,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘A stranger like this man in a blue suit, for example?’

Clive Brent looked awkward. ‘You’d need to talk to John O’Brian about that.’

‘I have.’

‘Then you’ll know all there is to know.’

‘He says that Annabelle asked him to say he’d seen the man to corroborate your account.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘That’s what he says.’

‘That may be what he says, but that’s not what happened – or it’s what happened but completely the other way round. It was John O’Brian who got a good look at him. Annabelle then asked me to say that I . . . Hang on, are you saying she
told both of us that the other had definitely seen the guy and that she just needed a second witness to make it more credible? And we both fell for it? Well, I’m a bloody fool and you can
tell John O’Brian he’s one too.’

‘I can’t tell him anything. He’s gone. Annabelle sacked him.’

‘Did she? Well, that’s a minor tactical mistake if she wanted him to continue to perjure himself for her.’

‘Looks like a change of plan. Maybe not for the first time.’

‘No, not for the first time.’

We both drank beer in silence for a while, then I remembered why I had come.

‘You had a motive for killing Robert,’ I said. ‘He stitched you up over that futures thing.’