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

person plural without checking there are at least two people with a desire to do some amateur sleuthing. From where I’m sitting, I can count only one – unless you are planning to join forces with Rupert. He also mentioned the word “we” in a similar connection, as I recall.’
    ‘Oh, come on … Ethelred … Red … Reddy Baby … I could be your apprentice. Please.’
    Hard-nosed and foul of tongue though Elsie might be under most circumstances, there was a distinct little-girly side to her – at least when it stood a better chance of success than other means.
    ‘Elsie, no.’
    ‘What if I said “pretty please”?’
    ‘I would not recommend it as a course of action likely to be successful.’
    ‘Oh, all right. But let’s just take a stroll up to Cissbury Ring, shall we? I could do with some exercise. Drink up, Tressider. You’re going walkies.’
    So, there it was. When pleading failed, she could always revert to ordering me around.
    The route from the Gun Inn to Cissbury Ring lies first along a road lined with low, bricky suburban bungalows, then skirts Nepcote Green’s willows and pretty flint cottages before climbing gradually but unrelentingly towards the broad skies and sheep-nibbled turf of the downs. When the road stops at the National Trust car park, the real scramble up to the iron-age fort begins.
    Elsie, whose training for events of this sort consisted of an evening in front of the television with a large box of Thornton’s Continental Selection, puffed a little as we climbed the last few steps and stood on the grassy rampart. The wind flapped against her unsuitable but undoubtedly fashionable robe. None of this however, for the moment, seemed to disconcert her.
    Sussex was rolled out before us, in every possible shade of green and brown, sweeping from one misty horizon to the other. Cloud shadows drifted over the rounded chalk escarpments and dipped capriciously in and out of dry valleys. In this vastness of earth and sky the works of man seemed insignificant pinpricks. Here and there the slopes were dotted with tiny white sheep. In a field below, what appeared to be a toy tractor chugged backwards and forwards, harrowing or drilling or gleaning or whatever one does in a tractor in the autumn. The idea that it might have been a child’s toy was accentuated by its bright primary colours – blue, red, yellow – in a landscape of leaf and earth. The thought of Geraldine on her (alleged) long walk away from West Wittering car park again flashed briefly in front of me.
    The September air had as yet no trace of winter’s hardness and the smell of the warm damp soil wafted up to us from the newly ploughed fields. Summer was still giving way reluctantly to autumn. The harvest was in. Soon leaves would start to dry, redden and fall. It was a scene to inspire anyone with poetic thoughts.
    ‘Well, one thing’s sodding well certain,’ said Elsie. ‘Your missus was done in up here. Nobody would drag a body up a slope like that.’
    ‘There might have been a gang of them,’ I reminded her mischievously. ‘The robber band dividing the loot amongst themselves by moonlight.’
    ‘Bloody hell, Tressider. Do get a grip,’ said Elsie. ‘Now, let’s see if we can find out where the body was discovered.’
    This too seemed unlikely, but on the flat ground in the centre of the ring we found small pieces of blue-and-white plastic tape hanging from a bush, indicating that the police had recently cordoned the area off. It was in one of the many rough, bramble-filled depressions that pockmark the site – old flint workings that pre-date even the construction of the earth ramparts. Originally they would have been thirty foot deep or more, but now they offer at best only a temporary hiding place for an unwanted corpse.
    ‘Not where I would choose to hide a body if I wanted it to stay hidden,’ said Elsie, echoing my own thoughts. ‘But good enough for a day or two while you put a few miles between