The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L. C. Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

humiliating detail.’
    ‘Fingerprints, yes, as a routine precaution. But not a grilling, Elsie, far from it. It is clear that I am not in any sense a suspect. In addition to identifying the body, they merely wished me to confirm where I had been over the past four days.’
    ‘And …?’
    ‘You know perfectly well. I was in France until the day before the body was found.’
    ‘So let’s get this straight,’ said Elsie. ‘We are being asked to believe that your wife—’
    ‘Ex-wife.’
    ‘—drove to West Wittering, either to fake a suicide or genuinely kill herself. She then walked away from the car, done up to the nines, and just happened to run into the Cissbury Strangler on her way out of the car park. Or bleeding what?’
    ‘The balance of probabilities,’ I said, ‘would seem to favour “or bleeding what”.’
    Visitors to West Wittering wore shorts and T-shirts in the summer, Barbours and Hunter wellies in the winter. As long as it was not actually snowing, they carried cool boxes and buckets and spades. Preferably they had dogs. Even when inspecting the body, it had struck me how incongruous it would have been for Geraldine or anyone else to have left the car park at West Wittering beach dressed in a red jacket and skirt and red high-heeled shoes. She could not have failed to be noticed as she walked back down the long, straight and open approach road into the village. She would have been an utterly dog-less, red, Italian beacon in a world of English greens and browns. And nobody had as yet come forward, it seemed, to report a sighting.
    ‘So,’ said Elsie, ‘was she killed somewhere else and her car left at West Wittering with a note written by the killer?’
    ‘Possible,’ I said.
    ‘But the note was on her own paper. Which means that the murderer must have known her well enough at least to get hold of it.’
    ‘Perhaps the paper was already in the car,’ I suggested.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘How should I know? A shopping list, perhaps.’
    ‘It had the top torn off,’ mused Elsie.
    ‘That need not be significant,’ I said. ‘It was just a bit of scrap paper that happened to be available. I know a red herring when I see one. Trust me. I’m a hack writer.’
    Elsie considered this point and nodded several times more than I felt was strictly necessary. ‘All right then, what about this? She was planning to run off with somebody else. He picked her up from the car park – or even left the car and the note there with her knowledge. Then he double-crossed her. Lured her up to Cissbury Ring and strangled her.’
    ‘Why should he, when he could have drowned her at West Wittering much more convincingly?’ I asked, half facetiously. But Elsie seemed to take this objection equally seriously.
    ‘Maybe they fell out later over the division of the loot? Maybe he discovered that she was going to double-cross him?’
    I could well believe that double-crossing on this scale had always been a regular part of the home life of my dear ex-(now officially late) wife. But I just said, ‘Don’t you think that this is getting a little far-fetched?’
    ‘Why do you keep raising all of these objections?’ Elsie demanded. Nobody did narrowed eyes quite like her.
    ‘Because this is not a problem for us to solve. The police are already working on it. They have road blocks out there at this moment, questioning people going up to Cissbury Ring. They are going through databases of known criminals. They’re out fingerprinting the sheep for all I know. How can we compete with that, sitting in a pub with no chocolate?’
    ‘What would Fairfax say if he heard you now?’
    ‘He’d say quite right too. Fairfax has no time for amateur sleuths or for any policeman with less than thirty years’ experience.’
    ‘But just think if we solved this ahead of the Old Bill. Think what a book it would make.’
    ‘Who is this “we” of whom you so glibly speak? Don’t jump from the first person singular to the first