The Hanging in the Hotel (Fethering Mysteries)

by Brett, Simon

  Needless to say, meetings of the Pillars of Sussex involved a great deal of drinking.

  What made all this worse, from Jude’s perspective, was that the Pillars of Sussex was an exclusively male organisation. She had grown up suspecting that, in the absence of female company, all men do is get increasingly childish, and experience had turned the suspicion into a conviction. She did not relish the evening of raucous misogyny ahead.

  But her views didn’t matter; she was there to help out her friend. “What do you want me to do, Suzy? Bar?”

  “No, I’ll handle most of that. Part of being the hostess. Might need some help with the drinks orders before dinner.”

  “Trays of glasses of wine?”

  “I think this lot’ll probably be drinking beer. No, basically, I want you to help with the waitressing.”

  “Okay.” That was what Jude had been expecting. “Is it just me?”

  “No, I’ll help, of course. And I’ve got Kerry . . .”

  Suzy spoke as if this possession was not an unmixed blessing. Jude had met the girl on a previous visit—a sulky, rather beautiful fifteen-year-old supposedly destined for a career in hotel management. Since Kerry was in her last year at private school and without much prospect of making any impact academically, her parents had arranged for the girl to spend her Easter holiday doing “work experience” at Hopwicke Country House Hotel “in order to get some hands-on training.” The girl’s commitment to her career choice was not marked—her only interest seemed to be pop music—but Suzy Longthorne endured Kerry’s flouncing and inefficiency with surprising forbearance.

  Perhaps any help was better than none. Finding a steady waitstaff was a continuing problem for Suzy. “Don’t suppose you know anyone looking for some part-time work?” Jude was asked, not for the first time.

  She shook her head, not for the first time, and once again had the mischievous idea of mentioning the job to her neighbour. It wouldn’t be a serious suggestion. Carole Seddon, with her Civil Service pension and her hide-bound ideas of dignity, would be appalled at the notion of acting as a waitress. But Jude was playfully tempted to unleash the inevitable knee-jerk reaction.

  “Max is cooking for them, presumably?”

  “Yes.” Suzy looked at the exquisite Piaget watch which Rick Hendry had lavished on her for one of their happier anniversaries. “He should be in by now. I’m afraid the Pillars of Sussex aren’t his favourite kind of clientele. Still, how else are we going to get dinner for twenty and most of the rooms full on a Tuesday evening?”

  She spoke with weary resignation. Max Townley, Jude knew, saw himself as a “personality chef.” He was good at his job and, so long as Hopwicke Country House Hotel attracted high-profile guests, he had enjoyed mingling—and identifying himself—with celebrity. Since the downturn of the previous year, Max Townley had been less at ease, and Suzy knew that each “ordinary” restaurant booking she took made him more unsettled. The fact that fear of drunken driving convictions would guarantee most of the hotel’s rooms were booked for the night carried little weight with the chef. From Max Townley’s point of view, as clientele for a restaurant where he was cooking, the Pillars of Sussex were about as bad as it could get.

  “Are you worried about him not turning up?” asked Jude.

  “No, he’ll be here. Max is enough of a professional to do that. But he’ll make his point by being late . . . and resentful.” Her voice took on the chef’s petulant timbre. “A load of bloody stuffed shirts who wouldn’t recognise good food if it came up and bit them on the leg. And who will have blunted any taste buds they have left with too much beer before dinner, and then be allowed to smoke all the way through the meal.”

  “Really?” asked Jude, amazed. One of the strictest rules of the Hopwicke House restaurant had always been its nonsmoking policy. Mega-celebrities of the music and film business had succumbed meekly to the stricture, and retired to the bar for their cigarettes and cigars. The fact that the prohibition was being relaxed for a group as undistinguished as the Pillars of Sussex showed, more forcibly than any other indicator, the levels to which Suzy Longthorne’s aspirations had descended.

  But it didn’t need saying. Jude leant across the kitchen table and took her friend’s hand, still soft from its years of expensive lotioning.

  “Things really bad, are they, Suzy?”

  There was a nod, and for a moment tears threatened the famous hazel eyes.

  “Everything rather a mess, I’m afraid,” the Face of the Sixties admitted.

  “Anything you can talk about? Want to talk about?”

  “Some things, maybe. Certainly this.”

  From a pocket in her apron, Suzy extracted an envelope. It bore the Hopwicke House crest, but no name, address or stamp. The back had not been sealed, just tucked in, and the envelope was slightly bent from its sojourn in the apron.

  “Kerry found it in one of the rooms she was checking out. She said she opened it because she thought there might be a tip inside . . . though I think she was just being nosy.”

  Jude picked up the envelope. “May I?”

  Her friend gave a defeated nod.

  There was only one sheet of paper inside. Of the same quality as the envelope, again it bore the Hopwicke House crest. Centred on the page were three lines of printed text.

  ENJOY THIS EVENING.

  IF YOU’RE NOT SENSIBLE,

  IT’LL BE YOUR LAST.

  2

  THE PHONE CALL had disturbed Carole Seddon. Her life was rigidly compartmentalised, and many of its compartments had, she hoped, been sealed up for permanent storage. To have one of those old boxes opened threatened her hard-won equilibrium.

  Having retired from the Home Office early (and the earliness still rankled), moving with her Labrador Gulliver to a house called High Tor in the seaside village of Fethering had seemed an eminently sensible solution to the problem posed by the rest of her life. And, though the arrival of her next-door neighbour had added extra dimensions to that life, in her more po-faced moods Carole could still feel nostalgic for the acceptable dullness of Fethering pre-Jude.

  There was a sharp division in Carole Seddon’s mind between the lives she had lived in London and in West Sussex. She was happy to discuss her career as a Civil Servant, but had kept few London friends, and never talked about her personal life. Jude was probably the only person in Fethering who knew that her neighbour had once been married and that she was a mother.

  Had the phone call come from David, Carole would have been less flustered. Her relationship with her ex-husband had now settled down to something totally inert, its only remarkable feature being the fact that two people with so little in common had ever spent time together. Mutual financial interests, or news of long-lost relatives’ deaths, necessitated occasional phone calls, which were politely conducted without warmth, but without animosity.

  It was Stephen, however, who had rung Carole that evening, and she wasn’t so sure what her relationship with her son had settled down to. On the rare occasions when she could no longer keep the lid on that particular compartment battened down, its contents prompted a mix of unwelcome emotions. She felt guilty for her lack of maternal instinct. Stephen’s birth had been a profound shock to her, shattering the control, which up until then she had exercised over all aspects of her life. A woman who indulged in any kind of self-analysis might have deduced that she had experienced post-natal depression, but for Carole Seddon that was territory into which she did not allow her mind to stray. She had been brought up to believe that giving in to mental illness was self-indulgence. Life was for getting on with.

  All she knew was that, from the start, Stephen had represented a challenge rather than a blessing. She could not fault herself on the meticulous attention she had given to his upbringing, but she knew that she had never felt for him that instinctive love on which so many parents wax lyrical.

  So when, as an adult, Stephen drifted further away from her, Carole felt no extra guilt, no regret, possibly e
ven an inadmissible degree of relief.

  They never lost touch. Present-givings at Christmas and birthdays were meticulously observed. They rarely met in London, but at least twice a year Stephen would come down to the Fethering area and take his mother out for lunch. The meals took place in anonymous seaside restaurants or pubs, and passed off amiably enough.

  On these occasions Carole would say the minimum about her local doings, but Stephen seemed quite happy to monopolise the conversation. He talked almost exclusively about his work, which involved computers and money in a combination his mother never quite managed to grasp. She should have taken more interest when he first started his economics course at University of Nottingham; then maybe she would have been able to follow the subsequent progress of his career. As it was, when they met she felt increasingly like someone at a party who didn’t initially catch the name of the person to whom they were talking, and had left it too late to ask.

  So, if a question about their relationship had been put to them, both Carole and Stephen would have said that they “got on.” In spite of the divorce, theirs could by no means be classified as a “dysfunctional” family. It was just one that lacked spontaneous affection.

  And inside Carole grew the suspicion, which she was unable to voice—even to herself—that the entire contents of her son’s gene-pool derived from his father, and that Stephen Seddon was, in fact, a deeply boring man.

  But exciting things happen even to boring men, and that evening Carole’s son had had exciting news to impart.

  “Mother . . .” he’d said. As a child, he’d always called her “Mummy.” When he left for university, the word seemed to embarrass him. “Mother” was safer, less intimate. He’d stuck with it.

  “Mother, I’m engaged to be married.” The wording too seemed formal, distant.

  It was the last thing Carole had been expecting. For Stephen to ring was unusual enough; for him to ring with anything to say beyond vague pleasantries was unheard of. “Ah,” she responded, caught on the hop. “Wonderful.”

  Funny, she’d never really thought of her son as having a sexual identity. He’d certainly never brought any girls home. Though maybe, given the state of his parents’ marriage, he might have considered that an unnecessarily risky procedure.

  “Her name’s Gaby. I met her through work.”

  “And what work is that? Remind me again.” Of course she didn’t say the words, but Carole was surprised how readily they came into her mind. The unspoken response struck her as funny, and she knew that it would have struck Jude as funny too.

  She managed to come up with a more socially acceptable, “So how long have you known each other?”

  “Three years. But we’ve only been going out together for the last seven months.” Stephen spoke of his fiancée with exactly the same seriousness as he did about the work that Carole didn’t understand.

  “Does she do the same sort of thing as you do? Is she in the same company?” Whatever that’s called.

  “Oh no, no, she was a client. We set up a financing package for the agency she works for,” he continued, confusing his mother even more. She understood the individual words; they just didn’t seem to link together into anything that made sense.

  “Ah.” Carole tried desperately to think what potential mothers-in-law were supposed to say in these circumstances. “So have you thought yet about when you’re going to get married?”

  “September the fourteenth,” her son replied, surprisingly specific.

  “Well, that sounds fine.”

  “It fits in with Gaby’s parents. They always spend August in the South of France.”

  Oh yes, of course. The fiancée would have parents. Presumably at some point Carole would have to meet them. She shrank instinctively from the thought of contact with these unknown people. If their daughter was called Gaby, and they spent their summers in the South of France, then perhaps they weren’t even British . . . ?

  “Also,” Stephen went on, “that date suits Dad fine.”

  Carole was shocked by how much that hurt. Not just Stephen continuing to call David “Dad” while she had been relegated to “Mother,” but the implication of her ex-husband’s complicity in her son’s life. David had been told about the wedding before she had. He’d probably met Gaby. They all lived in London, after all. (At least presumably Gaby lived in London.) Perhaps David was regularly included in social excursions with the young couple.

  Her marriage, the event Carole thought she had locked away forever, was still capable of breaking out and reviving her pain.

  “I’d like you to meet Gaby,” Stephen pressed on doggedly.

  Carole felt new guilt. She should have said that before he did. “I’d love to meet Gaby soon”—that’s what she should have said. And yet, in the shock and smarting from the hurt, she was forgetting even her most basic good manners.

  “Oh yes, I’d love that!” Trying to make up the lost ground, she only managed to sound overeffusive.

  “We want to come down the weekend after next.” As her son spoke, Carole realised that he was following an agenda. His and Gaby’s lives between now and the wedding were rigorously planned. Telling his mother the news and introducing her to his bride-to-be were duties that had to be performed and fitted into their schedule. “We’ve got to be in the area.”

  “Oh, why?”

  No answer could have surprised her more than the one that Stephen came up with. “We’re looking at some houses down your way.”

  “Really?”

  “Gaby’s very keen to get out of London. We’re looking for a big family house in the country for the next stage of our lives.”

  So formally did her son speak these words that Carole knew, had Jude been there to hear them, they would both have giggled. But, on her own, Carole was too winded by the implication of Stephen’s words to offer any response.

  “So I was wondering, Mother, whether you’d be free for Sunday lunch that weekend.”

  “Lunch? Sunday week. Yes, that sounds fine.” Uncharacteristically gushing, she added, “I’m simply thrilled at the idea of meeting Gaby!”

  “She’s longing to meet you,” Stephen asserted, with all the enthusiasm of a weatherman announcing a cold snap.

  But he hadn’t finished. “There is one thing, Mother . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I am very keen that you and Dad should both be at the wedding. Will that be all right?”

  “Yes,” said Carole Seddon. “Yes, of course it will be.”

  That was only one of her worries after she had put the phone down. A lot of moribund emotions had been stirred, reminding her that they were still far from dead. And she knew they wouldn’t go away. September the fourteenth would be a climax, a day of maximum stress, but that would not end the process. She was reliving the myth of Pandora’s box. Now the compartment had been opened, Carole was made aware of its fragility, and felt foolish for the misguided reliance she had placed on its security.

  Another troubling thought occurred to her. It was rare for Stephen to come down to Fethering, and even rarer for him to stay overnight. On the few occasions when he wasn’t just down for a quick pub lunch and away, she put him up in her spare bedroom. But if he was coming with a fiancée . . . The spare room only had a single bed. Oh dear, would she have to arrange for a double to be brought in? Worse than that . . . would she actually have to ask Stephen what sleeping arrangements he and Gaby favoured? The potential embarrassment loomed large enough to cloud Carole’s entire horizon.

  Seriously shaken, she wanted to talk to Jude. But even though the April evenings were drawing out, it still went against Carole Seddon’s nature to knock on the front door of Woodside Cottage.

  She telephoned instead. Jude was out.

  3

  THE OUTSIDE DOOR of the kitchen clattered open and, as Max Townley entered, Suzy Longthorne slipped the sheet of paper and envelope back into her apron. The chef was dressed in black leathers. Outside he’d parked his worshipped moto
rbike. He had once tried to impress Jude with the fact that this was a Ducati, but her patent lack of interest hadn’t allowed him to get far. As he came into the kitchen, he removed a crash helmet, revealing short bluish-black hair. He was lithe and jumpy as a Grecian cat, his eyes piercingly pale blue, and his thin mouth permanently tight with discontent.

  He nodded acknowledgement to the two women, and focused sneeringly on Suzy’s Piaget watch. “It’s all right. They’ll get their precious dinner in time. Fat lot they’ll notice, though.” He moved angrily across to a butcher’s block, on which stood a box of vegetables and flicked through them. “Still no celeriac.”

  “They hadn’t got any celeriac,” said Suzy evenly.

  “I know they hadn’t this morning. You said you’d ring them.”

  “I did ring them, and they still didn’t have any celeriac.”

  “Well then, get a bloody different supplier! How am I supposed to produce a Celeriac Remoulade without bloody celeriac?”

  “You’ll have to do something else.”

  “I thought you’d agreed a menu with the guests.”

  “They won’t notice.”

  The chef’s face snapped back to face his employer, but the retort on his lips died in her stare. He turned back to the vegetables, mumbling, “No, hardly matters what I give them, does it? Might as well nip down and get them takeaways from McDonald’s. Bloody peasants’d probably prefer that.”

  Morosely, unzipping his leathers, he went through into the pantry to change into his freshly laundered white jacket, black-checked trousers and clogs.

  Jude knew she had just witnessed a battle of wills, and knew that Suzy had won it beyond argument. The triumph might simply be a credit to strength of personality, or maybe there was some other source of power. There had been rumours of an affair between the chatelaine of Hopwicke House and her chef, but Jude doubted their veracity. Such rumours clung around Suzy Longthorne and every attractive man she met, but she was too shrewd an operator to put her business at risk by an unprofessional liaison.