The School of English Murder (2 page)

Not for the first time Amiss excoriated himself for being so pathetically reliant on reading matter. He searched through his pockets in pursuit of diversion, pulled out his bank manager’s letter and read it with a scowl.

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Mr Amos,

Overdrawn £850

It is with disappointment that I learn from our Mr Kersse that far from making proposals to eradicate your overdraft you are now requesting an increased facility.

Since I understand that you have severed your connection with your employers and have no source of income I cannot permit you to increase the monies due to the bank.

In view of this situation we have had to recall your monthly direct debit to Wiggins. This incurs a bank charge of £15.

Please let me have your proposals for repayment as a matter of urgency.

Assuring you of our best attention at all times.

Yours sincerely,

N M MACERLEAN

‘Scots git,’ muttered Amiss sourly, trying once again to comprehend a system of operation which thought it sensible to levy a charge of fifteen pounds for bouncing a debit of ten pounds. Still, the silver lining was that not the most suspicious dispenser of Her Majesty’s welfare benefits could claim that he didn’t need money.

It was fifteen minutes later that he realised the line had slowed up so much that he would probably be stuck for at least another half hour. There were six people ahead of him and only two interviewers. And Detective Superintendent Jim Milton, who was due to meet him for lunch at one at a venue half an hour away, was a very busy man.

After a couple of moments of dither Amiss abandoned his seat. The line moved up one behind him. As he opened the door he turned back for a moment to survey the scene. The two men being interviewed finished together, rose and shuffled towards the back of the room. One vacant seat was taken by the woman first in line; the second by a man behind whom the next four people formed a semicircle. With a low moan of disbelief Amiss realised that he had failed to spot that they were a family. He debated trying to regain his place at the top of the pecking-order, thought about stories of punch-ups and murders in the Social Security office, and muttering a curse, left for Milton and the winebar.

‘Poor old Robert.’ As so often in the course of their friendship — forged during the police investigation into the murder of Amiss’s Civil Service boss — Milton found himself simultaneously laughing at and sympathising with Amiss’s latest mishap. ‘Will you go back this afternoon?’

‘God, no. I couldn’t face it twice in one day. I’ll go back tomorrow morning bearing a hipflask and a complete set of Trollope.’

‘You won’t get enough to do more than survive, you know. Let me lend you a few hundred until you get a job.’

‘Thanks, Jim. I do appreciate the offer, and I promise I’ll take it up if I’m starving, but I’m curious to see if I can get through this by myself. You can buy lunch, though.’

‘Well, make the most of it. I won’t be able to entertain you again for a couple of months. I’m being sent to Staff College.’

‘Does that mean your promotion is on?’

‘It certainly does. You’ll be able to call me Chief Superintendent before long.’

‘You’d better buy us champagne then.’

‘Cheeky sod,’ said Milton, summoning the waitress. ‘Lucky for you I’ve been working since two this morning and am on my way home to bed. Otherwise it would be sparkling mineral water.’

‘Yeh. Same for me in the days when I worked. I can see advantages to being unemployed. You can get pissed at lunch-time.’

‘On what you’re likely to get from Social Security,’ said Milton cheerfully, ‘all you’ll be able to afford is meths.’

Amiss was still hot and cold with a mixture of rage and shame when he got home from the Social Security office the following day. It had been one thing to learn that if anything Milton had been over-optimistic: meths would be way beyond his budget if he had to subsist on what the state was offering. That he had taken in his stride. What had caused the trouble was the attitude of the tiny narg behind the reinforced glass.

‘Well, of course it’s not for me to say, but you have been very irresponsible, haven’t you?’ had been bad enough. ‘If I were you I’d make a serious effort to get a job soon,’ had been marginally worse. Then, when the state of Amiss’s overdraft had been discussed, had come, in the same unctuous tone: ‘You’re sure you didn’t put something aside in a building society for a rainy day? We can find out, you know. It’s better to be honest.’

‘That’s what did it,’ he wailed to Rachel over the phone,

‘Did what?’

‘I shouted that no one should ever deal with a man under five feet two and stormed out.’

‘Ouch!’

‘And now I’m awash with liberal guilt at mocking the unfortunate.’

‘And haven’t any Social Security money.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Can’t I send you a cheque?’

‘Please, no. All this is my own fault and I’ve got to get myself out of it. I can live on credit until I pickup a temporary job.’

‘I can’t wait to hear the next instalment. A row with your landlord? Or the credit card companies?’

‘Actually it’ll probably be the bank. I wrote a letter yesterday afternoon which I rather regret.’

‘Irascible?’

‘Splenetic is more like it.’

‘Robert, darling, I don’t think misfortune agrees with you. Let’s hope your luck turns soon.’

‘Don’t you worry. I’m about to tear into the appointments sections and find my new career. You’ll see. I’ll be draping you in ermine and pearls yet.’

‘Until then I’ll settle for a share of a bed in London. Preferably not under the arches at Waterloo.’

2

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‘Dear Sirs,’ wrote Amiss, painstakingly and slowly on his manual typewriter. ‘In response to your advertisment in the
Independent
, I should like to apply for the post of Purchasing Manager.

‘I have recently completed a year in a senior purchasing capacity in the British Conservation Company, on secondment from the Department of Conservation.’

He paused, read through what he had written, spotted the missing ‘e’ in ‘advertisement’, applied erasing fluid to the last four letters, attempted to replace them with five, surveyed the result critically, swore, tore out the page, crushed it into a ball and hurled it in the direction of its fellows.

He got up, made another mug of strong coffee, lit his last cigarette and surveyed his small living-room with distaste. Every surface carried its own variety of mess. The typewriter was barely visible in between piles of blank paper, large white envelopes, stamps and torn out pieces of newspapers; one sofa sported piles of his curriculum vitae while the other bore the newspapers and magazines he still had to scour for job advertisements; on the bookcase were four dirty mugs and two full ashtrays; and the floor was largely covered by discarded newspapers, abandoned drafts and letters of rejection.

He went into the kitchen and searched vainly for a plastic garbage bag. As he returned reluctantly to the typewriter, he reflected on why he seemed incapable of doing such a mundane job without creating chaos. For this, as for so much else, he blamed the Civil Service, which had coddled him for such a long time with filing clerks. He stifled a wave of nostalgia.

He reread the advertisement to which he was currently trying to apply. It required him to live in Birmingham, to travel widely within the United Kingdom and to reorganise a warehousing system for a cosmetics company. Apart from carrying with it a company car which he did not want and private medical insurance of which he did not approve, it closely resembled the Civil Service job which he had so angrily refused.

Systematically Amiss sorted through all the other advertisements he had selected. He threw away the eighty per cent that demanded qualifications or experience which he completely lacked. He had already been turned down for dozens of similar jobs in management, marketing, personnel and business consultancy. Good academic qualifications and a stated willingness to learn were no substitute for pieces of dubious paper from business schools.

Critically he reread closely the other twenty per cent. He knew uneasily that although these seemed open to someone of his background and experience, he laboured under a serious disadvantage. In Civil Service terms his record was excellent: recruited into the élite fast stream, he had bypassed most of his contemporaries to secure one of the most coveted jobs — private secretary to the head of his department. But of course to most businessmen all that was meaningless: the only part likely to make sense was his valueless period of secondment to a wally department in a wally organisation and even that was extremely difficult to write up attractively.

He reflected bitterly on the irony that most civil servants who went out on secondment were offered highly attractive bribes to stay. The talents they revealed on the job: their articulacy, industriousness, clear-mindedness and above all, a mastery of prose beyond the wildest dreams of most businessmen, made them prize captures. But it was not until the outside world saw them in action that these talents were recognised. It was dispiriting how outsiders clung resolutely to the image of all civil servants as dreary hidebound grey men in suits. He could hardly be surprised that so far he had been offered only two interviews, both for commission-based sales jobs he knew he would be incapable of doing successfully.

He and Milton had mulled over his joining the police and had concluded the idea was a non-starter. ‘You’d be better working with knaves than fools, Robert. You’d go crazy being ordered about by slow-witted bigots. And with all our efforts we’ve still got a fair number of those.’

‘What makes Ellis able to cope?’ Amiss had asked, for Milton’s protégé, Detective Constable Pooley, graduate and ex-member of the Home Office, continued to flourish. ‘He’s like me. Ultimately he’s got a vocation that enables him to put up with almost any amount of shit. And besides that he’s buttressed by an insatiable passion for crime-solving.’

Amiss felt the old familiar longing for a vocation and an even sharper one for a cigarette. He looked at his watch and realised it was in any case time to go out to his lunchtime job. As he reached for his raincoat he heard the telephone. It was Pooley proposing dinner. ‘On me, Robert.’

‘That’s not necessary,’ said Amiss rather stiffly, feeling slightly indignant that his misfortunes were being bandied about the Met. ‘I’m a barman now and making enough to finance the occasional feast at a greasy spoon.’

‘No, please, I insist. In fact I’d like it to be at my place. I’ve got an idea I want to talk over with you.’

‘Ellis, you wouldn’t be trying to get me involved in any boy-wonder detective stuff by any chance? I’m off corpses for Lent.’

‘Lent’s long over. What about tonight?’

‘Well, it is my night off.’

‘Done. Come at eight.’ And Pooley rang off.

Amiss stood thinking for a moment. Then, repressing his misgivings, he shrugged, picked up his raincoat and set off for the Fox and Goose.

3

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‘Good God, Ellis. This isn’t an interest. It’s an obsession.’

‘You disappoint me, Robert. What next? Are you going to ask me if I’ve read them all?’

‘Sorry,’ said Amiss, surveying in awe the huge book-lined Victorian drawing-room that made up three-quarters of Pooley’s flat. ‘How many books, roughly?’

‘Ten thousand, at a guess.’

‘And the proportion that are crime-related?’

‘Maybe seventy per cent.’

‘Give me the guided tour.’

‘When I’ve got you a drink,’ said Pooley, and led Amiss into the kitchen.

‘It all started with Sherlock Holmes when I was eight,’ he said, mixing their gin and tonics. ‘I became an awful bore trying to make deductions based on people’s appearance. Even now I practise on the tube, though I doubt if even Holmes would have found it that easy in a multi-racial society — stretches one’s knowledge pretty thin. It’s more than I can do to tell the Dutch from the Germans or the Indians from the Pakistanis. Anyway, then I progressed through Edgar Allan Poe to general detective fiction.’

He led Amiss over to the far right-hand corner of the room.

‘That’s what makes up these two walls.’

‘They all look pretty elderly,’ remarked Amiss, as his eye was caught within seconds by Margery Allingham, Freeman Wills Crofts, Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy Sayers.

‘No. They go chronologically, not alphabetically. So at the end you’ll see a few that came out only last month.’

Amiss walked over and scrutinised his host’s latest acquisitions. ‘Playing it safe, aren’t you, Ellis? Ruth Rendell? Reginald Hill?’

‘I have to be highly selective now,’ said Pooley sadly. ‘I confine myself to the authors I’m sure will still be read in thirty years time. Otherwise I’d have to live in a warehouse.’

He waved across the room. ‘The other shelves have great trials, lives of the great advocates, encyclopaedias of crime, dictionaries of poisons, general forensic stuff, popular psychology and so on. And to prove I’m not a monomaniac, there’s also a fair bit of history, literature and country stuff.’

‘Country stuff?’

‘Yes. Topography, reminiscences of country life, picture books. That sort of thing.’

‘I didn’t have you down as a rural type.’

‘Well I shed my Devonian accent at school.’

‘Where were you at school?’ asked Amiss idly. He looked towards the sofa and scanned the tables at either end.

‘You’re looking to see if I have ashtrays, aren’t you? Hang on, here’s a saucer you can use.’

‘Are you sure you don’t mind? Most people do.’

‘Well, I’m not most people,’ said Pooley, with a slight hint of sanctimoniousness. ‘Anyway, what’s the use of inviting you here and having you a nicotineless nervous wreck all evening.’ He waved Amiss to the sofa and sat down in the rocking chair himself.