The Poisoning in the Pub

by Simon Brett

  “I’m not so sure…”

  Sally Monks looked up sharply. “What do you mean? Are you suggesting it wasn’t just a ghastly accident?”

  “Well, there are a few odd facts about what happened. For a start, all of the fighting was round the front of the pub, and Ray’s body was found round the back. Carole and I looked, but there was no trail of blood. He hadn’t been moved. His body was lying where he had been killed. Also the weapon used was one of the knives from the pub’s kitchen. Well, all right, in the chaos it’s possible that some of the fighters out the front had raided the kitchen for weapons, but I don’t think it’s likely.”

  “So you’re saying that Ray was deliberately murdered?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “But why?” Sally Monks’ pretty forehead wrinkled with confusion. “As I said, he hadn’t got an enemy in the world. He wouldn’t have knowingly done anything to upset anyone.”

  “But he might have known something that somebody wanted kept quiet. I can’t imagine that Ray was the most discreet person when it came to keeping secrets.”

  “No. He’d blurt out anything to anyone.”

  “You seem to know him very well, Sally.”

  “Yes, he was part of my caseload while he was still living with his mother. I used to visit them a lot. But she was getting so infirm that the situation couldn’t continue. So I arranged for him to go to Copsedown Hall, which, after a few initial hiccups, suited him very well. I thought I’d really got a result there, you know, giving him some independence before the old girl did finally pop her clogs. Copsedown Hall comes under another social worker’s remit…you wouldn’t believe the tangles of bureaucracy in our world…so I stopped seeing Ray on a regular basis, but I gather it was really working out for him.” She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, suddenly teary. “And now this has happened.” But she quickly halted any potential slide into melancholy. “Anyway, Jude, you implied Ray might have known something that someone wanted to keep quiet. Am I allowed to know more?”

  Briefly Jude filled Sally Monks in on her visit to Copsedown Hall the previous Saturday.

  “So he admitted changing the trays of scallops round?”

  “Yes. But he thought he was doing good. Whoever persuaded him to make the switch convinced him that he would be saving the Crown and Anchor from an outburst of food poisoning.”

  “Whereas in fact he was doing the exact opposite. God, what kind of person would take advantage of someone like Ray in that way? Must have been someone who knew something about his character. The bastard was appealing to one of Ray’s most basic instincts. Ray was always trying to help out, trying to make things better. If he had a fault, it was his desire to please everyone. Which is why he hated it so when people lost their tempers with him. That used to upset him terribly.”

  “And when he got upset, he went to his mother’s?” said Jude, thinking of the effect of Ted Crisp’s uncharacteristic outburst against Ray.

  “Yes,” said Sally. But she sounded preoccupied as she continued with the chain of logic she had been constructing. “So Ray was stopped from telling you the name of the person behind the poisoning by the appearance of Viggo?”

  “Yes. Do you know Viggo?”

  “Come across him a few times. Fantasist, and I’d have thought pretty harmless. But I may be wrong about that. As I recall, he had an obsession with guns, watched lots of violent movies. I think he wanted to go into the army, but they wouldn’t have him. Big disappointment for him, I seem to remember. But are you suggesting that he deliberately stopped Ray from spilling the beans to you?”

  “No, I think his appearance in the Copsedown Hall kitchen at that moment was just coincidence.”

  “But you reckon whoever it was who got Ray to swap the trays of scallops was also the person who killed him to keep him quiet?”

  Jude shrugged. “It’s a vaguely plausible theory. Only one I’ve got, anyway. Mind you, I don’t have anything in the way of proof…”

  “Don’t be picky,” said Sally Monks. Her red hair swung as she shook her head at the enormity of what had happened. “God, I’d like to get the bastard who did this.”

  “So would I.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help in any investigation you may be carrying out…?”

  “Thank you. I’m sure there’ll be other things I want to ask you,” said Jude, ever mindful of the danger of Carole’s extremely sensitive nose being put out of joint. “And one thing I can ask you right now. Do you think Ray’s mother would talk to me?”

  “I’m sure she would.” Sally Monks produced a Post-it note and scribbled a phone number down on it. “Nell will be absolutely devastated by what’s happened. I must go and see her too, but I can’t for a couple of days. Ray was her world, you know.”

  Sixteen

  Nell Witchett lived in a ground-floor flat near West Worthing station. She had been very pleased to get a phone call from Jude and keen that she should come round as soon as possible. She said that though it was only two days after his death, nobody wanted to talk about Ray, everyone avoided the subject.

  The street was rundown, dusty in the July heat, and there was a smell of dustbins that hadn’t been emptied recently enough. Nothing happened for so long after Jude pressed the bell-push that she was beginning to wonder whether it was working. But then through the frosted glass of the front door she saw a slight figure slowly approaching.

  The appearance of Nell Witchett explained the slowness of her approach. She was stick-thin and edged forward on a Zimmer frame. In spite of the heat, she wore two cardigans over a woollen dress and thick stockings. In their velcro-strapped shoes, her feet looked knobbly and painful.

  “Come in quickly, love,” she said. “I don’t like to leave the front door open too long. There are some nasty types around here. They’d burst in and steal your purse before you could say Jack Robinson.”

  Jude did as she was told and was ushered along a narrow hall whose floor was littered with junk mail. “You go ahead of me, love. If you wait for me, you’ll be here till the Christmas after next.”

  Again Jude followed her instructions and found herself in what used to be called a ‘bed-sitting room’ before its dimensions were massaged by estate agents into a ‘studio flat’. The doors off the hall indicated that four such units had been carved out of the small ground floor. Nell Witchett’s was basically a single room with bathroom and kitchen attached. These were separated by sliding doors; there wouldn’t have been room to have ones that opened outwards.

  While its owner made her effortful journey back from the hall, Jude had time to take in the room. It was very stuffy. The windows at the front were closed, and didn’t look as though they’d been opened for a long time. Whether that was for fear of draughts or of the ‘nasty types’ around the area, Jude couldn’t know. A bit of each perhaps.

  And the room was absolutely crammed with furniture which must have come from a larger house, stuff its owner couldn’t bear to part with. Just moving across the room was potentially hazardous; there were so many sharp edges oftables and dressers to bang against. Nell’s bed was piled high with blankets and eiderdowns; the old lady had probably never slept under a duvet in her life. There was a low sofa that must have been where Ray dossed down when life in the world outside got too tough for him.

  And there was a small television on, showing some early-evening quiz programme where contestants vied noisily for cash prizes. It must be on one of the terrestrial channels, of course, because Sally Monks had said that Ray’s mother didn’t have Sky. Had she had Sky, Jude briefly wondered whether Ray might not have returned to Copsedown Hall the weekend before, and so might not have been at the Crown and Anchor on the Sunday, and so…But she curbed such speculations, they were pointless.

  Though he was dead, the room was full of Ray. There were photographs on every crammed surface. Faded ones of him as a baby, the outlines becoming more defined as he grew into adulthood. And in every photograph a
huge smile. He had clearly loved having his picture taken.

  As Nell Witchett inched her way into the room, Jude was struck, not for the first time, by the importance of mobility, and how the approach of death was so often preceded by a gradual but accelerating slowdown. It was nature’s way. So long as a human being can move about, he or she can keep up some kind of fitness regime. But as mobility diminishes, with it goes confidence. Confidence in the most basic actions which one has taken for granted for so long. Being able to walk, being able to lift oneself out of a chair, being able to reach down to put on a shoe.

  Then a lack of confidence can lead to falls, and falls are often the precursor of the end.

  Thinking along such morbid lines was unusual for Jude. She didn’t fear death, she knew it to be as integral a part of being human as any other experience. And normally her outlook was resolutely positive. But the sight of Nell Witchett, for whom simple locomotion was now such a painful effort, had lowered her spirits. Or maybe that had been caused by the death of Ray, who was so clearly the sole focus of the old woman’s life.

  And yet, as she talked to Nell, Jude didn’t encounter the misery she had anticipated. Although her son was not two days dead, Nell Witchett seemed very much in control of her emotions. Almost serene.

  Before Ray’s mother finally deposited herself into her chair, she offered Jude tea or coffee, but seemed quite relieved when the invitation wasn’t accepted. There was also relief as she sank on to the piled cushions and leaned against the stiff back of her chair. Jude wondered how much of her time was spent sitting there, how much her life had dwindled to this single piece of furniture.

  Nell immediately raised the subject of Ray, but still without becoming emotional.

  “I met him for the first time last week,” Jude explained. “At Copsedown Hall. It seemed a nice place,” she added rather vacuously.

  “Yes. He’s settled there. Most of the time. It’s good, the first time he’s managed to live independently.”

  “How independent was he really?”

  The old woman shrugged. “As independent as someone like Ray ever could be. He’s always going to need support.”

  “From you?”

  “From me or someone else.” Nell was quiet for a moment. “Usually me, to be honest.”

  “What about the social worker who looked after Copsedown Hall? Ken, was that his name?”

  “What about him?”

  “Was he someone Ray could turn to for support?”

  Nell Witchett let out a dismissive grunt. “He’s useless. Lazy bugger. Hardly ever goes there. Not one of the good social workers. Mind you, they’re as rare as hen’s teeth.” She spoke with a lifetime’s experience of the breed.

  “But everything was very well looked after at Copsedown Hall. Neat and tidy.”

  “No thanks to Ken. It’s the residents who keep it like that. Particularly a girl called Kelly-Marie.”

  “I met her last Saturday.”

  “She’s very organized, in her quiet, dogged way. She keeps the men up to scratch.”

  “Is she the only female resident?”

  “Yes. She may not have all her marbles, but her head’s screwed on the right way.”

  “And was she a particular friend of Ray’s?”

  “They get on all right. Nothing more. They talk quite a lot together, I think.” Jude made a mental note to have a further word with Kelly-Marie, as Nell went on, “Ray spends most of his time with the men at Copsedown Hall.”

  “Like Viggo…?” Jude suggested.

  The old woman’s tight brow wrinkled with disapproval. “Yes, too much time with Viggo. He’s not a good influence.”

  “In what way?”

  “Viggo’s a fantasist.” Jude was struck that Sally Monks had used the very same word. “He’s always full of wild ideas,” Nell Witchett went on. “Sees himself as various kinds of flashy characters.” Like a biker, thought Jude. “But it’s all in his head. Anyway, I don’t think he’s good for Ray. Stuffs his head with ambitions the poor boy has no hope of fulfilling.”

  “Would you say they were friends?”

  The old woman snorted. “Not my idea of friendship. Ray’s afraid of Viggo, always trying to placate him, do what he wants. I wouldn’t call it a friendship, where Ray does all the giving, while with Viggo it’s just take, take, take.”

  Jude couldn’t understand the way Nell Witchett was behaving. She was showing no grief at her son’s death. And she kept talking about him in the present tense. Jude wondered whether the old woman had actually taken in what had happened. Cautiously, she raised the subject.

  “I was desperately sorry to hear about Ray.” Probably not the moment to mention that she and Carole had found his body. Time for that later, perhaps.

  “Yes, very sad,” Nell agreed, but with sorrow, rather than anguish.

  “You’ve no idea who might have killed him, have you?”

  “No. And I’ll be surprised if we ever find out.”

  This seemed an unusually incurious response. “But presumably the police are on the case,” said Jude. “They’ll be investigating.”

  “Yes.” But Nell Witchett didn’t sound very interested in the subject. “Yes. I doubt if they’ll find the killer, though.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it sounds like there was a riot down at the Crown and Anchor. Lots of people caught up in the fighting. When you get a mob like that, anything can happen. Poor Ray just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not for the first time, either,” she added, but still with pity rather than grief.

  “Have the police talked to you, Nell?”

  “Oh yes. First a couple of them came in the early hours of Monday morning to tell me what had happened. Young they were, a boy and a girl. I felt sorry for them. Must be a dreadful part of the job for kids that age, telling people their relations have died.” All her sympathy was for the police officers, none for herself. “And then they came again yesterday. Another two. These weren’t in uniform, the second lot. Detectives, I think they said they were. They asked me lots of questions about Ray, and I told them what I could. But of course I didn’t know anything about what happened Sunday night.”

  “Did they seem to have any suspicions about who might have killed him?”

  It was a question unlikely to get an answer, and Nell Witchett batted it away pretty quickly. “If they did, they didn’t share them with me.”

  “No, I bet they didn’t,” said Jude. Throughout her experience as an amateur sleuth she had been constantly disappointed in how unwilling the police were to share details of their investigations.

  “And what about you?”

  “What about me?” Nell seemed genuinely confused by the question.

  “Do you have any thoughts about who might have killed Ray?”

  “One of the people in the fight.” The way she spoke, the answer was self-evident.

  “You don’t think Ray was deliberately targeted?”

  “No. That’s just how Ray was. I always worried that something like that would happen. He trusted people and I kept trying to tell him that some people were bad, that some people shouldn’t be trusted. But he never really took it in.”

  Jude thought how he must have trusted the person who told him to switch the trays of scallops, and felt another pang of frustration about how close she’d got to finding the identity of that person.

  “So you think Ray just wandered into the fight and that’s how he got killed?”

  Nell Witchett nodded. “The police said it must have been very quick. He wouldn’t have suffered much. So that was good.”

  She spoke with real satisfaction, and Jude could still find no explanation for the old woman’s behaviour. Nell had lost the son round whom her whole life had revolved, and yet she seemed to feel no pain. Jude still didn’t think it was the moment to reveal that Ray had been found at some distance from the fighting. Instead, she decided to go for a bit more background information.
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  “Is Ray’s father alive?” she asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” the old woman replied without interest. “I haven’t seen him since Ray was tiny. As soon as it was clear the boy wasn’t going to be normal, my loving husband upped and slung his hook.”

  “Did Ray remember him?”

  “Don’t think so. There was always just the two of us.”

  Then why, Jude desperately wanted to ask, aren’t you more upset by his death? But she continued to hold the question back, instead asking, “And do you know if Ray had any enemies?”

  The idea was so incongruous that Nell Witchett laughed out loud. “How could someone like Ray have enemies? All he wanted to do all his life was to please people. That’s why he got so upset if anyone shouted at him. Ray never knowingly hurt a soul. Oh, maybe there were people who he got the wrong side of, or who took him the wrong way, but that was never his fault.”

  “Was he ever bullied?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Well, people like him, people who are different from the rest of the world…sometimes they get victimized.”

  The old woman was silent as she thought about this. Jude was aware of the rasping of her breath, and the thinness of her body under the layers of clothes. At last Nell Witchett said, “Yes, he did get bullied. Does still. I reckon the way Viggo treats him is a kind of bullying. And Ray’s suffered that all his life. When they tried him at ordinary school, there was a lot of kids who picked on him, because…well, because, like you say, he was different. And the same at some of the special schools he went to. There’s always someone out there who’s going to take it out on a boy like Ray.” A gleam of anger came into the faded eyes as she said, “It made me mad. I could protect him when I was with him, but at those schools he was on his own. However much I wanted to be there for him, I couldn’t be.”