‘How was your morning?’ I asked.
‘Dull,’ said Tom. ‘I have detailed notes on a series of shopliftings and car thefts that I have to turn into news. The problem is making one shoplifting sound superficially different from another, or any of the shoplifters better than a two-dimensional caricature. I take your point that most real life crime is tedious in the extreme. To the extent crime fiction is based on reality, I don’t quite understand its popularity.’
‘It’s all a question of how you tell them,’ I said. ‘I’ve done a short story on a shoplifter that worked quite well – at least, I thought it did. The motive, at least, was amusing: to return something shoplifted from another store the previous day.’
‘Why?’
‘He feels sorry for the shopkeeper he stole from the first time round. He no longer has the thing he stole, so he steals another one from elsewhere.’
‘And he gets caught the second time?’
‘No, he gets caught as he smuggles it into the first shop to place it back on the shelves. The shopkeeper recognises him. Crime writers like irony and injustice. Most crime writing isn’t about crime, of course. It’s about detection. It’s a type of puzzle that just happens to be about murder. What makes murder a convenient vehicle is that one of the two people who know for certain what has happened is dead and the other isn’t letting on – indeed the other is usually lying through their teeth.’
Tom nodded, as if storing that information away on one of the remoter shelves in his memory. Then I added: ‘I ran into an old friend of yours outside the cathedral. Sophie Tate? She said she used to go out with Robin? She was engaged to him?’
The expected smile of recognition did not come. ‘What else did she tell you?’ he asked.
‘Not a lot. But you do know her?’
Tom looked over towards the bar, then paused for a long time before saying: ‘Yes, of course. Sophie Tate. I noticed she was at the funeral.’
‘And she was engaged to Robin before he met Catarina?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Not officially?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She also said she thought Robin was still using drugs.’
‘He told me he’d given them up,’ said Tom. ‘Why would he say that if he hadn’t? Is she around long?’
‘She said she was on holiday.’
‘Not just here for the funeral, then?’
‘Complete coincidence apparently.’
There was a hint of contempt in that last remark that was reminiscent of Sophie’s observations on Tom. And I remarked that he had merely noticed her at the funeral – not actually spoken to her, which was odd if he did know her and hadn’t seen her for a while. I waited to see if he would expand on his last comment but that seemed to be all he had to say on the matter. On reflection, it didn’t seem worth telling him which of the cottages in the village Sophie was staying at – not if he couldn’t be bothered to cross the churchyard and say hello. Perhaps they had had some past disagreement. Or perhaps it was simply that she and Tom had known each other less well than Sophie had implied. I studied the menu for a while. The sausage and mash with onion gravy looked good.
‘So, how are your investigations into true crime coming on?’ asked Tom, putting his own menu down.
That, rather than a discussion of the nature of crime fiction or Robin’s exes, was the reason for our meeting. Tom had promised to fill in, as far as he could, any gaps in what the papers had reported back in 1848.
‘I have a vague sense of unease about the whole thing,’ I said. ‘There was no firm evidence at all – just that George Gittings said he saw Lancelot Pagham by the church – and that the knife was Lancelot’s. The argument over driving cattle across the field doesn’t sound enough to occasion a murder. And where was George Gittings? Jane Taylor says quite explicitly that he was in Chichester all day. But his own testimony is that he stayed in West Wittering long enough to see Lancelot Pagham heading for the church. One of them is lying.’
‘Or the reporter got it wrong,’ said Tom. ‘You can’t assume everything was really said the way it was reported. It would have been a long day in court. You don’t always catch everything – especially when you’re struggling to get it all down in your notebook.’
‘That’s true. The judge had to warn everyone several times about the noise they were making, which can’t have helped. I’m not sure what to make of the rather odd remark about Jane having talked to Lancelot Pagham. It was a small village. Everyone would have talked to everyone, surely? Was something slightly more than talking implied? Jane seems just a bit too keen to stress that she was a respectable woman about to be married to a leading landowner. The judge didn’t follow it up, anyway, so I suppose we’ll never know what she meant by it.’
‘Not precisely,’ said Tom.
‘The judge seems to have taken against Lancelot Pagham quite early on. Fishermen weren’t supposed to be called Lancelot or to know Latin.’
‘I think Lancelot’s parents were painfully aware of how much they’d come down in the world. Giving their children fancy names may have compensated a little, though I don’t envy either of the brothers at school. Look at the tombstones of that period and everyone’s called William or John or George, with maybe the odd Isaac or Jacob. Lancelot seems to have taught himself Latin. It was said he knew Greek as well. He’d have probably been a university professor if he’d been alive today. But the life chances for fishermen weren’t that good back then, whatever they’d been baptised.’
‘But it’s George’s behaviour that I really don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I think he lied about having seen Lancelot at the church. He goes out of his way in his evidence to stress that rumours about Lancelot were untrue. He tries to intervene when it seems that his evidence is being misinterpreted. And yet everything he does and says seems to land Lancelot more deeply in trouble.’
‘Indeed. So it does. And, as you say, where was George all day?’
‘In Chichester, if Jane Taylor is to be believed.’
‘But is she to be believed?’ Tom opened his bag and took out an envelope from which he extracted a photograph. He passed it to me. Judging by the voluminous sleeves, the tight waist and the elaborately feathered hat, the picture dated from the last decade of the nineteenth century. The woman was, I judged, in her sixties. She was smartly dressed – clearly somebody who both cared for her appearance and had the money to buy the latest fashions. The clothes were dark – perhaps black – it was difficult to say. The sepia tones also did not reveal if her hair was blonde or grey, but not a strand was out of place. Her head was tilted slightly to one side. There was nothing in her face that constituted a smile, but her expression left you in no doubt that she was pleased with herself. Her gaze challenged the camera to do its worst.
‘Jane Taylor,’ said Tom. ‘There’s a note on the back saying that the picture was taken in 1895. She would have been sixty-four then. Her husband had died twenty years before.’
‘She looks quite … spirited.’
‘We’d probably say “feisty” these days. It’s a shame we don’t have one of her in 1848. I bet she turned men’s heads then.’
‘How did you get the picture?’
‘From the family album. She’s my great-great-great-great-grandmother. She married George Gittings about four months after his brother’s death. George was by that time a prosperous farmer himself, having inherited everything from his murdered brother.’
‘Married within four months? Quick work for those days,’ I said.
‘Quick work by any standards.’
‘So, let’s get this right: after John’s death, George gets the girl, the money and the farm?’
‘Exactly. Cui bono? as the judge so rightly asked.’