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

the inside.
    I suppose it must have been around three o’clock when I decided that nobody could reasonably object if I stretched my legs in the garden, and I opened the front door to
be surprised (as one always is slightly surprised) by the bracing chill of a late-summer night. It brought back memories of other times when I had been awake at this hour at this time of year
– usually early-morning journeys to the airport with Geraldine, driving down to Gatwick to board charter flights leaving for Alicante or Goa or wherever she had decided we should go that
year. The clean freshness of the air and the silence recalled past nights, past relationships, past departures. At the moment, however, nobody was going anywhere. My car was still parked for the
quick getaway that Elsie had planned, should the evening prove dull. The once-clear path was however now blocked by a police car and a van, beside which there were, for some reason, two portable
floodlights, their dormant cables coiled round their bases. There was also a pile of what appeared to be plastic sheeting. I wondered if I should take notes for my next book. Probably not. These
things were easy enough to make up.
    The official investigation was still proceeding somewhere inside Muntham Court, and I could be doing no possible harm admiring the stars from where I was, but a vague feeling that I should not
be there made me wander round to the side of the house. It would be good to sit on a bench for a few minutes, away from other people, to gather my thoughts. A bench was there, but somebody else had
had much the same idea. A hat-less policeman was already lounging on it, the red tip of an illicit smoke glowing in the dark. On hearing my approach he started to his feet, his cupped hand poised
to lob the offending butt into the bushes. He saw me and dropped back onto his seat, the cigarette still in place. He should probably have looked the guiltier of the two of us – nobody had
actually told me that I couldn’t leave the house, but he was almost certainly forbidden to smoke on duty. He simply smiled, however, and nodded.
    ‘Nice evening, Joe,’ I said.
    ‘Almost morning, Ethelred,’ he replied.
    We had met before. A little late in my career as an author of police procedurals I had taken to consulting my local police station on points of detail. He had recently briefed me, over coffee,
about scene-of-crime investigations. The plume of smoke that he calmly exhaled suggested that he thought I owed him one – at the very least that I would not dare mention this to his
inspector.
    ‘Did you know Mr Muntham well?’ he asked me.
    ‘Sir Robert Muntham,’ I said. ‘I’d known him a long time. I’m not sure I knew him well.’
    ‘Very sad, anyway. I mean, sad that he decided to kill himself. It’s a bit like that Simon and Garfunkel song. You know the one . . .’
    ‘“Richard Cory”?’ I looked at the policeman. I hadn’t got him down as a Simon and Garfunkel fan. I adjusted his age upwards a few years. ‘Interestingly, the
song was based on an earlier poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.’
    ‘Who?’ he said.
    Well, I had thought that it was interesting anyway.
    ‘It’s odd though,’ he continued. ‘Mr Muntham had everything, didn’t he? Money, a title, this place . . . And yet he chose to end it all.’
    ‘Are you saying it must have been suicide?’ I asked. ‘Is that what Lady Muntham has been told?’
    ‘Of course, the investigations aren’t complete. You obviously shouldn’t repeat what I’ve just said . . .’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    He turned away and deftly flicked the remains of the cigarette onto the lawn, where it remained glowing for another minute or so. We watched it until the last small dot of red faded to
nothing.
    ‘I’d probably best be getting back,’ he said at length. ‘Good to see you again, Ethelred.’
    ‘Good to see you, Joe,’ I said.
    The first hint of dawn was already in the sky when we were finally told we