The Poisoning in the Pub

by Simon Brett

  “Hm. Well, anything I can do to help…We social workers do have quite a lot of insight into what goes on around here.”

  “Thanks, Sally. I’ll be glad to take you up on that. And, actually, now I remember, there was something I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Fire away.”

  “That girl Kelly-Marie…”

  “Up at Copsedown Hall?”

  “Yes. Nell Witchett said that she and Ray used to talk a lot together.”

  “I can believe it. They’re a pair of the gentlest people I’ve ever met. Would have had a lot in common.”

  “I was going to go up to Copsedown Hall and talk to Kelly-Marie.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I just wondered if there was anything I ought to be aware of. You implied you knew her.”

  “Yes. She was my responsibility for a time. Very well organized.”

  “That’s what Nell said.”

  “Knows her limitations. Very aware of the things she can’t do. But she doesn’t let it get to her. A perpetually sunny disposition. God, I wish more of my charges were like her.”

  “Has she got parents still alive?”

  “Yes, nice middle-class couple up in Fedborough. And a couple of brothers, I think, who have no disabilities. It was Kelly-Marie herself who announced she wanted to live somewhere like Copsedown Hall, to prove she could be that independent. Which she certainly has proved.”

  “How do you think she’ll have taken Ray’s death?”

  “I think she’ll be upset, but not totally devastated. Kelly-Marie does understand about death. She does know that her parents won’t be there forever.”

  “And you don’t think my talking to her about Ray would upset her?”

  “No. Anyway, Jude, she’ll tell you if she thinks it will. She’s very direct.”

  “No idea what she’s doing at the moment, whether she works…?”

  “I’m pretty sure she has got a job.”

  “I was just wondering when might be the best time to call at Copsedown Hall, you know, when she’s likely to be in…”

  “Oh, don’t just go up on the off chance. She’s got a mobile. Ring her.”

  “And do you, by any chance, have her number?”

  Sally Monks did.

  ♦

  The two neighbours met up later for a glass of wine in the garden of Woodside Cottage, which, like its owner, looked lush and abundant. Carole didn’t know how Jude did it. There was never any sign of her actually working in the garden, very little evident watering, minimal mowing of the lawn. And there were certainly none of the geometric paths and borders that distinguished the garden of High Tor. But, in spite of this, at the back of Woodside Cottage everything flourished, even in as dry a summer as the one they were currently experiencing. Carole had never liked to ask how this horticultural miracle had been achieved. She was afraid she’d get some more of Jude’s New Age mumbo-jumbo. If her neighbour went out and talked to the plants at midnight – which she was quite capable of doing – well, Carole Seddon didn’t want to know about it.

  Jude quickly brought her up to date with what she’d heard from Sally Monks. “I’d be very surprised if there turns out to be anything suspicious about Nell Witchett’s death.”

  “Except that it came so soon after her son’s murder.”

  “I’m not saying the two are unconnected. I think that Nell had just been holding herself together because she was worried about who would look after Ray when she’d gone. Once he was dead, she relaxed and the death that had been on hold for months, possibly years, caught up with her.”

  Carole sniffed. Her logical instincts went against the idea of people choosing the time of their own death, but she couldn’t deny that Jude’s argument was persuasive.

  “Anyway, putting that on one side, you said you were going to speak to Kelly-Marie…”

  “Yes. I phoned her. Very happy to talk to me, but she can’t do anything till Saturday. She’s got a job in one of the Fethering retirement homes – just cleaning I think basically – and she’s got an eight-hour shift tomorrow.”

  “Ah,” said Carole. “I won’t be around on Saturday.”

  Though neither said anything, both women were relieved by this news. They both knew Jude would be better on her own with Kelly-Marie.

  “Where will you be?”

  Carole looked rather embarrassed. “Fulham. I’m having lunch with Stephen and Gaby. Then they want to go off and buy a new laptop for Gaby…”

  “And leave you looking after Lily?”

  “Yes. It won’t be for long, and she does still have a sleep in the afternoon, but…” Carole looked nervous. “I hope she’ll be all right with me.”

  “Of course she will,” said Jude in a way that ruled out any negative thinking. “Anyway, tell me what happened earlier this evening. The lovely Sylvia came to see you?”

  “Yes, and what a poisonous woman she is. Deeply stupid too, I reckon. But I think I have got a link between Matt and the dodgy scallops.” Briefly Carole recapped her conversation with Sylvia.

  Jude sat back and took a thoughtful sip of her wine. “That’s good. And of course Matt dresses in black leather, doesn’t he? Just like the bikers do. Maybe he was behind the sudden influx of bikers into the Crown and Anchor.”

  Carole was attracted by the idea. Her pale blue eyes sparkled as a chain of logic began to join up in her mind.

  “So it looks,” said Jude, “like we need to make contact with the monosyllabic Matt.”

  “Yes, I thought I’d do that,” said Carole boldly. “For a start, he knows who I am. Then again, if he and Sylvia are really under the illusion that Ted and I are an item…”. She didn’t manage to suppress all of her distaste for the expression “…then it might not seem odd if I were to approach him.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “The question is: where am I going to find him? We don’t know his surname, so the basic phone-book approach is out of the question.”

  “Ted must have a number for where Sylvia’s staying. She keeps on and on about wanting him to ring her back.”

  “Yes, but Ted’s in such an uncooperative mood at the moment. I tried ringing him at the Crown and Anchor earlier. Zosia said he wasn’t there, but there was a kind of hesitancy in her voice that made me think he probably was there, just not taking calls.”

  “We could go back down to the pub and confront him.”

  Carole looked at her watch. “Nearly closing time. We’d be lucky to make it before they locked up. Anyway, as I said, I don’t think Ted’s very likely to give us much cooperation.”

  “Well, he’s got to start cooperating. Keeping things to himself isn’t doing any good. If he’d told the police about Ray being in the kitchen alone that Monday morning when the rest of them were all down in the beer cellar…”

  Jude didn’t need to finish the sentence. Another silence ensued. Finally the day was beginning to cool. The slightest of breezes animated the herbal smells of Jude’s garden.

  A sudden idea came to Carole. “I know! The one place I can guarantee to find Matt is when he makes the next beer delivery to the Crown and Anchor.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Mind you, whether led will even vouchsafe us that information…”

  “Zosia will.” As she spoke, Jude picked up her mobile from the table and summoned a number from the memory.

  The Polish girl answered. There was a very small amount of subdued mumbling in the background. It didn’t sound as though the Crown and Anchor had yet got its evening trade back. Still, it had only reopened that day.

  When Jude identified herself, Zosia sounded disproportionately pleased to hear her – another indication perhaps that she’d had a long boring evening without much to do.

  Jude thought it worth checking whether she could talk to Ted, but Zosia said awkwardly, “No, I’m sorry, he’s a bit…tied up at the moment.” Jude had a perfect mental image of the landlord slouched over a large Famous Grouse miming that he d
idn’t want to take the call.

  “Oh well, you could tell me, Zosia. You remember the Monday of the food poisoning?”

  “Hardly likely to forget it, am I?”

  “No. But I remember you saying that the beer delivery van came that morning. I just wonder, are the deliveries always made on a Monday?”

  “That’s the regular pattern, yes.” Jude nodded this information to Carole, who looked a little downcast. She’d geared herself up to a confrontation with Matt, and now it looked like she’d have to wait till Monday.

  Would she still have the confidence then that she had now with a few glasses of Chardonnay inside her?

  “But,” Zosia went on, “everything’s all over the place at the moment. We had our first closure, which put the beer takings down, but then we had the Dan Poke evening when we sold infinitely more than we would normally. Then they couldn’t deliver Monday, because we were closed down again…for reasons which I don’t need to spell out to you. So they’re making the delivery tomorrow morning.”

  “What sort of time?”

  “Usually around ten. So we can get everything sorted before we open at eleven.”

  Right, ten o’clock tomorrow morning it is, thought Carole when the information had been relayed to her. My confrontation with Matt. And she still had enough Chardonnay inside her to relish the prospect.

  Twenty-One

  – Carole Seddon wasn’t quite so confident the following morning at about a quarter to ten as she brought her Renault to a halt in the empty car park of the Crown and Anchor. She felt exposed, and her main anxiety was that Ted Crisp might issue forth from his fortress to ask what the hell she thought she was doing there.

  But he didn’t appear. There were no signs of life from inside the pub, and from the look of the boarded-up frontage it might have been out of business for some months. Carole settled down to wait. She had brought her customary Times crossword, but was too tense even to look at it. She let the paper stay in the capacious handbag, into which, after much indecision before she left High Tor, she had put another item.

  Say one thing for Matt, he was good on timing. More or less on the dot often his vehicle appeared at the end of the lane that led down to the Crown and Anchor. Carole got out of her car. She hadn’t made detailed plans for the forthcoming encounter, but she had decided that the best time to catch Matt would be before he rang or knocked on the pub door. Ted’s current unpredictable responses might not make him an ideal witness to the conversation she hoped for.

  She was surprised by the vehicle Matt was driving. She had expected one of those long flat-back lorries whose whole back was filled with beer barrels, but instead he was in a white van. A large white van, certainly, but nothing that could be dignified with the title of a ‘lorry’. Delivering from that somehow made the inclusion of a tray of scallops in the load look more likely.

  Fortunately the driver didn’t seem in any hurry to get out of his cab. As Carole approached, she could see him hunched over the steering wheel, checking through some paperwork on a clipboard. Though his van window was open, he didn’t see her coming and looked up in surprise as she coughed to gain his attention.

  It took him a moment to register where he had seen her before. Politely, she extended her hand and said, “Carole Seddon. We met at the Seaview Café.”

  He did not take her hand. Instead, he sneered and said, “I remember. You’re Ted Crisp’s current bit of stuff, aren’t you?”

  Though deeply offended by the description, Carole decided that this was another occasion where the impression that they were ‘an item’ might assist the cause of investigation, so she made no objection. All she said was, rather pompously, “It is not in that capacity that I have come to see you this morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “I met your fiancée Sylvia yesterday.”

  “Really? She didn’t say nothing about that.”

  “Well, that’s her business. The reason I’m here is that I wanted to talk about the delivery you made to the Crown and Anchor the Monday before last.”

  “Well, you may want to talk about it – I bloody don’t!” He slammed his clipboard down on the passenger seat and got out of the van. Though he had been higher than her in his seat, he hadn’t loomed in the way he did now, standing beside her. She was very aware of the intricate tracery of tattoos on his bare forearms. “I’ve got a delivery to make. That’s what I do – I make deliveries. I don’t bloody talk about them.”

  Carole decided it was the moment to take a risk. Not a decision that she made terribly often. She reached into her bag and produced the object that had caused her such soul-searching before she left the house. It was her old ID card from work, hopelessly out of date, but it did at least have a recognizable photograph (Carole Seddon hadn’t changed her hairstyle since her late teens) and the words ‘Home Office’ printed on it. She had thought it might prove just sufficient to fool someone of Mart’s intelligence.

  Her gamble paid off. Looking at the ID with a new caution in his eyes, he asked, “What’s all this then?”

  Having set off on her course of duplicity, Carole couldn’t backtrack now. “It’s a Health and Safety matter,” she said drily, feeling pretty secure that Matt wouldn’t know that Health and Safety came under the Department of Work and Pensions rather than the Home Office.

  “Oh yes?” He tried to sound casual, but she had caused him a little anxiety. Health and Safety had become the bugbear of any business, with no one quite sure what new arbitrary prohibition was about to be introduced. Children being stopped from playing conkers, pancake races forbidden, hanging baskets outlawed, all to prevent the unlikely occurrence of someone getting hurt. The papers had pounced on such stories of bureaucratic petty-mindedness, so Matt must have heard of them. And no doubt there were as many baffling new regulations for delivery men as there were for anyone else.

  “According to our records,” Carole went on, weaving a bit more of her growing fabric of lies, “you made a delivery here in the morning of the Monday before last.”

  Sullenly, he agreed that he had. As Carole went on, she realized that she should really have brought a clipboard or a file of notes. That would have made her enquiries look more official. Still, too late for that now. “You delivered three barrels of beer…”

  “Yes, it’s a regular order. May change a bit week by week, according to how well the boozer’s supply is going. It’s not my business what’s ordered. I just pick up the dockets with the orders, oversee the loading at the depot, and get off on my rounds.” He was distancing himself ever further from any responsibility for what had happened.

  “So the depot…” Carole went on, trying to sound as though she were confirming something she already knew rather than seeking new information, “…is at the brewery – right?”

  “No. The brewery’s miles away, Midlands somewhere, I think. The depot’s in Worthing. Stocks everything pubs need.”

  “Who owns the depot?”

  “Snug Pubs. Small chain they are, own a lot of pubs in the West Sussex area.”

  “But they don’t own the Crown and Anchor, do they?”

  “No. But there are quite a lot of local independent pubs that use the service. If the depot’s got extra capacity, makes sense to use it.”

  “So it’s not just beer you deliver. It could be food as well, could it?”

  “Look, what is this?” Matt seemed close to losing his patience. Carole, wondering how long the subterfuge could be maintained, flashed her obsolete Home Office ID at him again.

  It had the effect of calming him down, at least for a moment. “Yes, sometimes deliver food,” he said truculently. “Van’s got a refrigerated section in the back. Depends what’s on the docket.”

  “And what happens to these dockets?”

  “Customer keeps one copy, so’s they can check the delivery’s all there…and for their records. Then the top copy, the one they sign, goes back to the office at the depot. I take them all back at the end of each day b
efore I knock off.”

  Carole nerved herself. She was about to ask the direct question, whether Matt had actually delivered the tray of dodgy scallops to Ray in the kitchen of the Crown and Anchor. Just before she did, she wondered for the first time whether the police had also questioned Matt about that delivery. Maybe not, if they’d believed Ted Crisp’s story about Ray not being in the kitchen that morning. How much trouble the landlord had caused in his attempt to shield his simple-minded helper…

  She asked the question. “Did you make any food deliveries here that Monday morning?”

  For a moment it looked as though he wouldn’t answer. But then something…the power of the Home Office ID again, perhaps…forced him into a grudging reply. “There was a tray of stuff that had to come.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. It was covered with foil. It was on the docket, so I picked it up from the fridge at the depot.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know what it was. Surely the contents of the tray were printed out on the docket?”

  “No, it’d been written on in pencil.”

  “On both copies?”

  “Just the top copy, one that went back to the depot.”

  So, thought Carole, no incriminating evidence would be left in the Crown and Anchor kitchen. “And where is the depot?”

  “Worthing. I told you.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Fleet Lane,” he replied grumpily.

  “And what’s it called? Snug Pubs?”

  “No. They use it, but I don’t think it belongs to them. Depot’s called KWS. Something Warehouse Services, I suppose.”

  “And the K?”

  “No bloody idea. Everyone just talks about ‘KWS’.”