Free The Herring in the Library by L. C. Tyler

for the ambulance?’
    ‘Two or three minutes,’ said Fiona.
    ‘How long do you think he’s been lying here?’
    ‘Ten minutes? Could be twenty – absolute max.’ They looked at each other doubtfully.
    ‘If it’s twenty . . . shit . . . OK, we’ll try CPR anyway,’ said Colin.
    But even before the ambulance arrived, it was clear that this was going to be a murder inquiry. If any guests had plans to go home early, they were going to have to cancel them.
    The police interviewed us one by one. While awaiting our turn, I sat in one corner of the conservatory with Elsie. She had consented on this occasion to drink brandy.
    ‘How’s Lady Muntham taking it?’ she asked. That she did not call her Mrs Shagger spoke volumes. We were all in a state of shock.
    ‘Clive Brent and the McIntoshes are looking after her,’ I said. ‘I think Colin’s given her a sedative.’
    Elsie nodded. ‘It’s all a bit of a puzzle though, isn’t it?’
    ‘That’s what I was thinking. The door was very firmly bolted. I had to break a window to get in. It would have been easy enough for a murderer to get into Muntham Court – doors
have been wide open most of the evening. Somebody could have hidden until Robert went to the library and then gone in after him. But how did they lock everything up afterwards? It’s a classic
puzzle – a man dead in a locked room.’
    ‘And the answer is?’
    ‘Suicide or a very ingenious murderer,’ I said.
    ‘Not suicide,’ said Elsie. ‘You can’t strangle yourself. You’d pass out before you could do any permanent damage. It has to be murder and it has to be one of the
guests. I reckon there must have been fifteen to twenty minutes between Robert leaving the room and our finding the body. During that time Annabelle, the Hooper woman and the Smiths left the room
for five minutes or so. I think Fiona McIntosh did as well. Clive Brent claims he got lost during the tour. Then both McIntoshes were out of sight of the main party for a while.’
    ‘I’d be careful what you say to the police,’ I said. ‘I think you’ll find they’d prefer you to stick to the facts. All we know is that Robert was found
strangled in a locked room. And, as for it being one of the guests, it would have been very easy for anybody to break in while we were at dinner . . .’
    By the time the police got to me, they had already put together an account of the evening and I could add almost nothing to what they knew. Early on, we had all agreed, it would have been
straightforward for an intruder to enter Muntham Court and hide in the library or close by. Doors and windows had been left open with staggering generosity. Robert’s speech, with hindsight,
was regarded by everyone as a little odd, but nobody could put their finger on why. The time between Robert leaving the room and the discovery of the body was adequate for a killer to strike.
Meanwhile, all of the guests had been out of sight of the others at least briefly. In addition to the guests, there had been two members of staff at Muntham Court that evening. Diana Michie, the
house-keeper, had been in the kitchen. The idiot boy proved to be called Dave Peart. He was precisely what he had appeared to be – the assistant gardener, pressed into service as a kitchen
assistant and waiter. The gardener himself, John O’Brian, had been working late, but had not been seen inside the house by anyone – when the police arrived he had already gone home,
apparently unaware that anything unusual had happened. Gillian Maggs, the cleaner, had finished her work that afternoon and had left hours before the guests arrived. That might have given the
police some sort of shortlist but, bearing in mind the general level of security at Muntham Court, half the population of Sussex (East and West) had had the opportunity to murder Robert. The
problem was how any of them – guests, staff or casual intruders – could have got out of a room that had clearly been locked from