Cat Among the Herrings (3 page)

‘Sorry, Elsie, can I interrupt you?’

‘You have interrupted me, so clearly yes, you can do
that. Was there anything else you wanted to know?’

Tuesday looked at me blankly. ‘Sorry …’

‘I was writing a rejection letter,’ I said. ‘It is important to write them with care. I like to let the authors down gently.’

‘Me
too
. I think that’s
so
important. Did you find a few nice things to say to him?’

‘The letter is every bit as nice as he deserves. What did you want me for?’

‘Oh, Ethelred Tressider has just emailed. He said you would remember him …’

‘Ethelred who?’

‘His surname’s Tressider.’

‘What’s his first name?’

‘Ethelred.’

I paused briefly and frowned. ‘Does he write crap police procedurals set in the fictional town of Buckford, a place that has not changed since the mid-50s in any respect at all, a bit like Ethelred himself? Does he also write historicals featuring Geoffrey Chaucer, which give him unrivalled opportunity to spout Middle English poetry, thus lowering the tone of an otherwise average crime novel?’

‘Yes,’ said Tuesday, brightening up, as she always does given the slightest encouragement.

‘Nope, still can’t place him,’ I said.

‘He used to be one of our authors,’ said Tuesday, ‘but he left us for Janet Francis.’

‘Oh
that
Ethelred Tressider,’ I said. ‘What does he want? I suppose he’s come crawling back, asking us to represent him again?’

‘Why?’

‘Because Janet Francis dumped him – or he dumped her.
That’s the word on the street. One or the other. He’s well dumped, anyway. Just tell him to piss off.’

‘He’s not asking you to represent him.’

‘No? What does he want then?’

I opened my emergency chocolate drawer and rummaged around, while Tuesday chattered happily to herself. Mars Bar or Kit Kat? A tricky choice. If I was to have to consider Ethelred’s problems then the extra glucose in the Mars Bar would probably help. So, Mars Bar it was, then. But possibly with the Kit Kat in reserve? All of the carbs in that biscuit base to keep my brain ticking over …

‘And a friend of his has written a book,’ Tuesday continued. ‘He’s planning to send it to you.’

‘Brilliant. A bigger slush pile. Just what I need. You’ve made my day.’

Tuesday pulled a face. I’d taught her about irony. She no longer assumed I always meant it when I said she’d made my day, in the way she did when she first joined me as my assistant. For some weeks she must have thought I was very, very easily pleased. And that most manuscripts we received were brilliant. Now she knew better. ‘He thinks you’ll enjoy it,’ she said cautiously.

‘Yeah, right. As if.’

‘Ethelred says his friend writes for the
Observer
.’

‘The
Chichester Observer
?’ I said, unwrapping the Kit Kat.

‘Ethelred doesn’t say. Shall I tell him not to send it?’

I hesitated. You need to kiss a lot of frogs in this business. ‘Say I’m looking forward to it with excitement,’ I said.

‘Is that irony?’

‘You’re learning.’

I looked at her, standing there, so eager to please anyone in any way.

‘Just in passing,’ I said, ‘did you mean it when you said it’s important to let rejected writers down gently?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘No, really.’

‘Yes, really.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Just checking.’

‘So, did you investigate my murder?’

I looked at Tom blankly for a moment. I had just been emphasising again the synopsis and three chapters thing and the importance of following Elsie’s directions to the letter. In particular I had been explaining that, while Elsie would never rule out anything on a technicality if it looked likely to make her money, failure to observe her instructions at the outset would never be entirely forgotten. It would be stored away, in a safe, dry place, for Elsie’s future use. He might expect, perhaps many books into their relationship, to receive an arch observation that he’d never been able to count up to three. But Elsie rarely killed an author who might still have a book or two in them, and I didn’t think that could be what the threat referred to.

‘
Your
murder?’ I said. ‘You mean …’

‘My ancestor. John Gittings. I said I thought it would make an interesting subject for a book.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. I wondered if by ordering another round I could change the subject, but our glasses were both almost full. The problem is that people imagine all sorts of incidents will make an interesting subject for a book, but most won’t. The thing that is so amusing encapsulated in two hundred words quickly palls when expended to seventy or eighty thousand, just as the startling headline in the paper – ‘Scandal Hits Chichester Council’, say – often promises very much more than it is able to deliver. The trick for the fiction writer is to take the mundane, the everyday, and write it so that it grips the reader’s attention. Most real-life murders are depressingly similar. Tom had said himself that his ancestor’s death had appeared motiveless. Just one of several thousand murders between 1837 and 1901. A golden age in some respects – Sergeant Cuff, Mr Whicher, Sherlock Holmes. But in other respects not so much …

‘So, you think you can use it?’ Tom asked, for some reason misinterpreting my guarded silence as wild enthusiasm.

I sighed. This was, after all, his own family. I had to show a bit of polite interest. ‘Why don’t you tell me a little more about it?’ I said.

Tom nodded and took a preparatory sip of beer. Then, in a practised manner that owed perhaps to his being a reporter, he began. ‘OK. Well, my ancestor, if an uncle can properly be called that, was found stabbed to death in the Herring Field – that’s a parcel of marshy land down by Chichester Harbour, where in the distant past they smoked herring. Or so the story goes. Possibly they did just that – it’s not much use for anything else. These days, it’s used for nothing at all. He – my ancestor – was found face down in
the long grass. A fisherman’s knife was discovered close by, in a pool of stagnant water, blade uppermost, half hidden in a patch of reeds.’

He paused and looked at me.

‘OK so far,’ I said. ‘The stagnant water with the blade sticking out of it is a nice touch – a sort of Excalibur moment. Were there any suspects apart from this Lancelot that you referred to?’

‘Lancelot – Robin’s ancestor – was the owner of both the field and the knife. He never denied either fact, but said he had missed the knife the previous day. He thought he might have dropped it on the village green while he was mending his nets. He hadn’t been to the Herring Field for about a week, so he couldn’t have left it there.’

‘It wasn’t entirely cut and dried then?’ I asked.

‘No, it was the herrings that were cut and dried … Sorry, I’ll steer clear of the puns, shall I?’

‘It’s your story,’ I said. ‘Cheapen it as much as you wish.’

‘What I meant to say,’ Tom continued, ‘was that you are quite right. It was all very far from proven. But there was never more than one suspect. And the only hard evidence was the knife.’

‘Witnesses?’

‘No.’

‘So, you think they got the wrong man?’

‘The evidence wouldn’t have convicted somebody these days.’

‘And the name of the murdered man – your ancestor?’

‘John Gittings.’

I took out my notebook and jotted both names down, then closed it and allowed the elastic to snap back into
place. ‘So, in the absence of any real evidence, how did they prove that he’d done it?’ I asked.

‘As far as the jury was concerned, the fact that it was his knife was pretty much conclusive. No DNA then or fingerprinting. No CCTV. A bloody knife thrown down in haste beside a lifeless body was plenty – that and the fact that the Gittings were the richest family in the village in those days. If we swore it must have been one of them there Paghams, then it must have been one of them there Paghams.’

‘So your family swore under oath that it was Lancelot Pagham?’

‘Yes, they did swear – and very much under oath – but not intentionally.’

‘So how do you swear under oath accidentally?’

‘John’s brother George gave evidence at the trial that, the same morning, he’d seen Lancelot Pagham walking towards the church – in the opposite direction to the Herring Field. He actually tried to say that it couldn’t have been him.’

‘That was helpful under the circumstances – it was after all his brother who had been done in.’

‘I’m sure he intended to be helpful but, as the judge pointed out, there was a shortcut from the church down to the coast. All George had done was to prove that Lancelot was out and about just before the time of the murder. The detour via the church might have cost him five minutes, but not more. Plenty of time to do the murder and get back home.’

‘Not as helpful as all that, then.’

‘Not to the accused, anyway. George tried to protest
that he had been misunderstood, but was told to sit down. The jury seems to have placed some weight on George’s testimony, albeit not in the way he meant it. They say George was guilt-stricken for the rest of his life. He was never quite the same man after the trial. He died in 1875 – exact causes unknown.’

‘George didn’t believe Lancelot Pagham was guilty then?’

‘I suppose not. Or if he did believe it, he’d still tried to save him and failed miserably.’

‘But why would he particularly want to save him if he didn’t have good reason for thinking him innocent? Lancelot Pagham was a fisherman, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘And John Gittings was the lord of the manor or something?’

‘Not quite. He was a farmer and a big landowner.’

‘But still – not likely to be close friends with a poor fisherman.’

‘No. But Lancelot’s brother, Perceval Pagham, worked for the Gittings family. He was a labourer on their farm.’

‘OK – that makes a bit more sense, then. So, George tried to save the brother of one of his employees, who had been wrongly accused? I can understand that. But, and I have to come back to this, the person murdered was still
his
own brother
. He’d have had to be pretty convinced they’d got the wrong man.’

‘Yes, as you say, he’d have had to be fairly certain to have intervened like that. Otherwise, he should have been shouting for Lancelot Pagham to be strung up, as everyone else was. But family tradition holds that, after the trial,
he never smiled again. So, we have to assume he knew something. Maybe something he couldn’t reveal at the trial.’

‘Did Lancelot Pagham appeal?’

‘I don’t think people did in those days. Once convicted you were hanged in short order. Justice was a lot more efficient then.’

‘At least two Sundays had to elapse between judgement and hanging,’ I said. ‘I think I remember reading that somewhere, anyway. Time for repentance.’

‘Very useful if you were actually guilty,’ said Tom. ‘Not so much if you were innocent.’

‘True enough. And how exactly are you related to George Gittings, the brother who gave the helpful evidence? Another uncle?’

Tom frowned and counted on his fingers. ‘He was my great-great-great-great-grandfather.’

‘That’s quite a few greats attached to both the grandfather and the uncle. When was the murder? 1850s? 1860s?’

‘1848. It’s mentioned in the local guidebooks.’

I took out my notebook again and jotted down the year and the date of George’s death – 1875. George had had twenty-seven conscience-stricken years, then. Plenty of Sundays for repentance if he had indeed concealed something at the trial.

‘So, you think you can use it?’ asked Tom.

‘I didn’t think so at first. To be perfectly honest, Tom, I was listening only out of politeness to begin with. But maybe, after all … It’s an interesting case, if it really was a miscarriage of justice. Particularly in view of George’s failed attempt to save the man accused of killing his own brother.
And the idea that he knew more than he told the court. But why not just denounce the real killer if he knew what had happened? What was stopping him? And if he was only guessing – that somebody else
might
have done it – why did he take it so badly that he failed to save Lancelot?’

‘There would be more on it in the library in Chichester, of course.’

‘Yes, I suppose there would be.’

I noticed Tom had finished his beer. ‘My round,’ I said. ‘I think I can use that after all.’

‘Excellent,’ said Tom. ‘Has Catarina spoken to you again about investigating Robin’s death, by the way?’

‘She phoned me,’ I said. ‘I made it clear there was nothing I could do.’

‘Quite right,’ said Tom. ‘The coroner’s verdict was very clear. No room for reasonable doubt.’

‘Why do you want to know that? Were you expecting her to ask me again? Has she said something to you?’

‘No, not at all. It’s just that, from what I’ve seen of her, she seems a bit persistent. She strikes me as the sort of person who usually gets what she wants. A husband, for example. Dad says once she got her claws into Robin he was never going to escape. Anyway, I’ll have a pint of whatever you’re having, since you’re offering. Then I’ll get that manuscript off to your agent.’

‘My ex-agent,’ I said. ‘She’s my ex-agent.’