Chapter and Hearse

by Catherine Aird

  ‘They’ve been crawling everywhere since first thing.’ Hedger gave a melancholy smile. ‘It’s just as well that the chef’s off sick too. He wouldn’t like to see them there, poking into everything. Very territorial about his kitchen is our Melvyn.’

  ‘It’s your kitchen we’ve come about,’ Sloan reminded him. ‘Or, rather, goods continually stolen therefrom…’

  ‘I could wish now that someone had taken those duck eggs,’ said the landlord feelingly, ‘never mind the ham and cheese that’s always going missing.’

  ‘The high-value items,’ observed Sloan.

  ‘To say nothing of the meat,’ said Mine Host.

  Detective Inspector Sloan pointed to the array of bottles behind the bar. ‘But not the wines and spirits?’

  ‘Not a drop,’ said Johnny Hedger. ‘Mind you, it’s under lock and key when the bar’s closed and there’s always someone here when it isn’t.’

  ‘But kitchen’s aren’t usually secure,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘No, and my accountant says that, according to the figures for the provisions we buy in, we should be making much more profit on the catering side than we do.’ Hedger sighed. ‘How he knows beats me, but there you are.’

  ‘Clever chaps, accountants,’ said Sloan. It was a view endorsed time and time again by his colleagues in the Fraud Squad.

  ‘I suppose they know all the wrinkles,’ said Detective Constable Crosby naïvely.

  ‘Nearly all of them,’ remarked Sloan. The Fraud Squad had one or two up their sleeves too, but this wasn’t the time or place to say so. He got back to the matter in hand. ‘What does your chef say – assuming it isn’t him that’s half-inching the goods, of course.’

  Johnny Hedger frowned. ‘Melvyn says it could be any of the kitchen staff. Or all of them. And that I can look into their handbags when they go home if I like, but he’s not going to.’

  ‘Chicken, isn’t he!’ pronounced Crosby, who had yet to encounter a really cross middle-aged woman with a genuine grievance.

  ‘He says he’s too young to die,’ said the landlord.

  ‘They’d take umbrage as quickly as they’d take a joint of beef, I suppose?’ said Sloan more realistically.

  ‘Quicker,’ said the landlord gloomily. ‘And take themselves off too, I dare say.’

  ‘As good cooks go,’ murmured Sloan.

  Hedger rolled his eyes. ‘They very nearly walked out on me when I stopped them eating when they were working here.’

  ‘Even the leftovers?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘What’s a leftover?’ demanded Hedger rhetorically.

  ‘Ah…’ said Sloan, a man who in his day had spent a lot of time in court listening to lawyers splitting hairs. ‘That’s a point.’

  ‘At least the accountant saved me from that one,’ said Hedger. He sniffed. ‘Makes a change from him costing me, which he does. An arm and a leg, usually.’

  ‘How come?’ enquired Crosby, evincing some interest at last.

  ‘Said if I fed the staff here – that is, allowed them to eat my food on my premises while they were working here without charging them the going rate – then it would have to show in the books.’

  ‘Which shut them up pretty quickly, I expect,’ said Sloan, who knew a thing or two about mixing human nature with money both not in hand and taxable to boot.

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Johnny, with something of his old energy returning. ‘They didn’t like that one little bit.’

  ‘So if they want it, the staff have to steal the food rather than eat it here,’ concluded Crosby simply.

  ‘But it doesn’t apply to you,’ pointed out Sloan to the landlord. ‘You must have eaten some of the pudding…’

  ‘The accountant allows in the books for the wife and me consuming the restaurant food whether we do or not,’ agreed Johnny, ‘it not being considered natural that it should be otherwise.’

  ‘Or,’ persisted Sloan, ‘you wouldn’t both have been ill too.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Johnny uneasily.

  ‘There’s a thief in the house, all the same,’ said Crosby.

  ‘You find him, then,’ said the landlord wearily. ‘Or her. You’re the detectives. Not me.’

  ‘Someone must be taking the goods,’ said Sloan, briskly, ‘if there’s food missing from the place on a regular basis.’ Somewhere at the back of his mind was lurking the proper distinction between groceries and provisions, but this was not the moment either for such verbal niceties. The all-embracing word ‘goods’ would have to do.

  ‘But how to find out who?’ asked Hedger.

  ‘And how to prove it,’ added Detective Inspector Sloan. The trouble with all the animadversions of Superintendent Leeyes was that they stuck in the mind. As he had said, identifying the guilty was only half the problem these days … Evidence – preferably of the watertight variety – came into it as well.

  ‘I just want the losses stopped.’ Hedger shrugged. ‘It’s quite difficult enough making a place like this pay without having the ground cut from under your feet by thieves in the night.’

  ‘Not in the night,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby, who was of a literal turn of mind. ‘In the day.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ admitted Johnny Hedger. ‘It must be in the day. The deep freezers and the refrigerator are all locked when Melvyn goes home to Luston. He gives me the keys.’

  ‘Melvyn’s off sick too, you said,’ remarked Sloan casually.

  ‘Can’t keep a thing down, his family say,’ said Hedger with patent sympathy. ‘None of them can. They’ve had to have the doctor to him. Just like me and the wife…’ His voice trailed away as he was struck by the significance of the words he had uttered.

  ‘Just so,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan sedately.

  ‘I think I see your drift,’ Hedger went on lamely.

  ‘I don’t,’ began Crosby, then he stopped. ‘Oh, yes, I do.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sloan drily.

  The Detective Constable said, ‘Your chef could be suffering from half-baked duck eggs too, Johnny.’

  Sloan pointed to the envelope which Hedger had shown them. ‘Yes, or more accurately what the doctors have called whatever it is that caused the food poisoning. Typhimurium, did you say it was?’

  ‘Which he must have got from pinching the duck eggs,’ deduced the Detective Constable, a trifle belatedly.

  ‘Well, I can tell you he didn’t buy them from the farmer,’ said Johnny Hedger. ‘The Health and Safety people have checked on all the customers who’ve bought eggs from him. First thing they did.’

  ‘Though whether Melvyn got his food poisoning from pinching the duck eggs,’ amended Sloan. ‘is something which remains to be proved…’

  ‘Beyond reasonable doubt,’ put in Johnny Hedger, veteran of the odd pub fracas and therefore no stranger to the magistrates’ court. He looked up as a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman came in, her coat over her arm. ‘Thank goodness you’ve arrived, Margaret,’ he said to her. ‘You can take over the bar – drinks only to be served today – and I can put my feet up for a bit.’ He gave the two policemen a strained smile. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, I must take a look at the wife too.’

  Detective Constable Crosby turned to Sloan and said, ‘Can we go over to Luston now, sir, and finger the chef – this Melvyn fellow?’

  ‘On what charge?’ asked Sloan mildly. Luston was right over the other side of the county and he was well aware that the constable liked driving fast cars fast.

  ‘Theft,’ said Crosby promptly. ‘He didn’t just take a bite while he was here, because his whole family is ill. He must have taken either a load of the eggs or enough of the pudding for the lot of them.’

  ‘Very probably. But what are you going to use for evidence? Real evidence, Crosby – the sort that the Superintendent likes, not the circumstantial variety.’

  ‘The eggshells?’

  ‘Gone long ago, I’ll be bound.’

  He frowned. ‘What you said, sir? The Typhimurium?
’

  ‘And how are you going to prove that?’

  Crosby’s face fell.

  ‘Think, man,’ adjured Sloan. ‘Think.’

  Crosby scratched his head. ‘Send in the food police?’

  ‘Better than that. Try again.’

  The Detective Constable’s face looked quite blank.

  ‘Shall we assume,’ said Sloan patiently, ‘that Melvyn’s doctor has also diagnosed food poisoning and…’

  ‘And notified it!’ Crosby’s hand smacked down on the table. ‘Like the doctor here did.’

  ‘Exactly. A different doctor in a different part of the county certifying that Melvyn and his family are suffering from the identical strain of the bacillus present in the food causing the trouble here should help your case no end.’

  ‘My case, sir?’ the Detective Constable’s face turned pink with pleasure. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘After all,’ said Sloan, since food was the essence of the case here, ‘dog doesn’t eat dog.’

  Child’s Play

  Henry Tyler wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, but he was – there was no doubt about it – panting ever so slightly as he approached the Beacon Hotel. But he wasn’t disappointed with what he found. He’d been drawn to the place in the first instance by its address – the sound of Tea Garden Lane had an attractive ring to any walker. So did the name of the area where it was situated – Happy Valley.

  And then he’d spotted the building itself from halfway across the opposite hillside and immediately realized that the view from its terrace would be well worth the climb up. In theory, visiting High Rocks had been next on his agenda, but the hotel and luncheon called. High Rocks would have to wait.

  He paused on the hill just below the hotel itself, ostensibly to admire that selfsame view but actually to get his breath back properly before he presented himself at the bar. A walking tour was all very well in its way, but it came hard to a civil servant who normally spent his working days at a desk in Whitehall.

  Henry had passed the weekend before with his married sister, her husband and their two children in the small market town of Berebury, in rural Calleshire, by way of both winding down from the cares of state and limbering up for his break from routine. This plan had worked up to a point, even though the children had clamoured for his attention almost all the time they were awake. But meeting their demands had not exactly been preparation for striding through the steep lanes of the delightful border country of Kent and Sussex round Tunbridge Wells in high summer.

  His nephew and niece, after all, had only required him to play pen and paper games with them. As far as more active pastimes were concerned, they were united in being against them, smacking as they did, they insisted, of compulsory games at school. Their doting uncle had ruefully concluded that the children of today were totally opposed to any activity that involved them in making any move that required more physical effort than tearing open a packet of crisps.

  His breath recovered, Henry clambered up onto the hotel terrace and acknowledged that the view was memorable. He stood looking south until a more urgent need made itself felt. After all, even Goethe had said that no man could enjoy a view for more than fifteen minutes. As far as Henry was concerned at this moment, the bodily requirement of a long cold drink displaced the soul’s drinking in of beauty in less than five.

  He made his way inside what must have once served as the ground floor of a rather grand private house and was now a welcoming bar. A Foreign Office man himself, he was naturally interested in architecture. The place must be late Victorian, he decided, but nicely shorn of Victorian excess. There was already the feel of forthcoming Edwardian comfort and amplitude about it.

  Henry collected something with which to slake his immediate thirst but resisted pausing overlong at the bar on the illogical grounds that he was too hungry and too thirsty. He’d need to forgo wine with his meal if he was to tackle High Rocks that afternoon.

  He climbed a flight of stairs and found himself faced with a choice of rooms in which to eat. There was a dining room on his right set for a formal luncheon which he shied away from like a nervous horse. Formal luncheons were the bane of his working life in the Foreign Office. Some important guest invariably said something very undiplomatic, no matter how much time had been spent on the placement. Attempting to retrieve the situation usually spoilt Henry’s afternoon and evening.

  Beyond that he spotted a small room, ideal for the intimate exchange, but long experience had taught Henry to be as wary of private encounters as of formal luncheons. These were the rooms that were the first to be bugged. They were also the ones whose comings and goings were the first to be noted by interested observers. Moreover, who could say afterwards with any certainty what had or had not been said in a private room? In an uncertain world, civil servants liked certainty.

  He moved forward carefully, spotting an inviting table in the window which must enjoy a splendid view, but he stopped when he saw that there was already someone sitting there. In a way this was a help, as his first instinct – being a Foriegn Office man to his fingertips – would have been to avoid such an exposed position. He was just reminding himself that he was off duty and it didn’t matter where he sat when the figure at the table turned and said, ‘Hello, Tyler.’

  ‘Good Lord, Venables … What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ said the other man morosely. He was sitting with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands cradling the bowl of a wine glass.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Henry.

  He had some justification for this response. Malcolm Venables was known to work for one of the obscurer branches of what used to be called – before the advent of tabloid newspapers and their investigative journalism – as the secret service.

  ‘I’m damned if I believe it myself,’ said Venables testily. ‘Never thought I’d find myself in Tunbridge Wells of all places.’

  ‘In the way of work, you mean?’ asked Henry cautiously, taking a second look at the man. Downcast was the only way of describing those drooping shoulders and sunken head.

  Always alert on behalf of the needs of his own great department of state, Henry Tyler started to run through in his mind the circumstances that might have brought Venables to these parts in such a state of obvious depression.

  ‘Yes, worse luck,’ grumbled Venables.

  ‘I see,’ said Henry. This could be serious. The interaction between the Foreign Office and Malcolm Venables’s own particular division of the secret service (which rejoiced in the name of Mercantile and Persuasion) was a very delicate matter indeed; so delicate, in fact, that otherwise honourable – and sometimes even Right Honourable – gentlemen had been known to stand up in high places and declare that no links existed.

  Venables indicated the chair opposite him. ‘Are you going to join me, Tyler? I’m alone. Absolutely alone,’ he muttered. ‘And likely to be out on a limb into the bargain before very long.’

  ‘I don’t suppose things are as bad as that,’ said Henry, with the detachment of a man safely out of reach of his own office. He could see, though, that something had seriously upset Venables this Monday morning.

  Henry cast his mind rapidly back over the news items in the papers. There had been nothing in them which had caught his attention today, and in spite of the pen and paper games with his nephew and niece, he had taken care to study the weekend papers as thoroughly as usual.

  ‘They are,’ said Venables, waving to the waiter to bring another glass. ‘And I just must talk to somebody…’

  ‘Problems?’ Henry enquired delicately, taking the proffered chair and pulling it up at the table in the window opposite him.

  ‘Just the one,’ said Venables, taking a long sip from his glass. ‘But it’s a big one.’

  ‘Swans singing before they die?’ suggested Henry lightly, since this was an increasing problem in all government departments.

  ‘No,’ said Venables rather shortly. ‘N
ot that.’

  ‘Certain persons dying before they’ve sung?’ This, thought Henry from long experience, was less of a worry, but you never knew …

  ‘It’s not a laughing matter, Tyler. This is serious.’

  ‘Matter of life and death, then?’ hazarded Henry a little unfairly. Unfairly, because he already knew that it wouldn’t be death that worried the man from the Mercantile and Persuasion Division – an outfit known affectionately throughout the corridors of power as ‘Markets and Perks’. Death was always the least of their troubles in that department – it was a number of other words beginning with ‘D’ which were the Four Horsemen of their particular Apocalypse. Henry was all too aware that Disclosure, Débâcle, Dishonour and Double-dealing ranked far higher on the danger list of M and P than mere death.

  ‘Well, not quite life and death,’ admitted Malcolm Venables grudgingly. ‘Not for us, anyway. It might very well be for other people. Who can say?’

  ‘Tell me what you can,’ invited Tyler, mindful of constraints to do with the Official Secrets Act, D Notices, the need-to-know basis and plain common sense. There was, though, behind these the inviolable tradition of their respective services that that which was revealed between the two of them would not be spoken of to others. Ever.

  Venables pointed to a row of venerable – if not yet quite antique – wireless receivers arrayed on a shelf above them by way of ornament. ‘Would you say they were safe?’

  ‘Valves worn out long ago,’ said Henry briskly. ‘Not a bug between them, I’m sure. Carry on…’

  ‘I must say it’ll be a relief to talk to somebody sane,’ admitted Venables.

  Tyler did his best to project sanity.

  ‘Coming down to Tunbridge Wells has made me realize that there are no sane cryptographers. Did you know that, Tyler?’

  ‘I’ve always had doubts about all experts,’ said Henry Tyler mildly. ‘Obsessive, conceited, compulsive, opinionated…’

  ‘Paranoic … Oh, thank you.’ This last was to the waiter who had brought more cutlery, a table mat and a napkin for Henry.

  ‘Monomaniac too, most experts,’ added Henry. ‘Only about their own thing, of course.’