Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries)

by Brett, Simon

  Jonny Tyson continued to work at Bracketts, and to keep the Weldisham garden just as his father had always kept it. His father died, but Jonny felt sure the same thing would never happen to his mother.

  Mervyn Hunter continued his sentence in a secure prison. Jude continued to visit him and tried to give him confidence, tried to tell him he was no danger to anyone, and sometimes, briefly, Mervyn believed her. When he was released, he hoped to find work as a gardener. But he was also tempted to reoffend. He still felt safer in prison.

  And Jude continued her intermittent sessions at Austen Prison. She continued to work harmoniously with Sandy Fairbarns, and neither of them ever knew anything about each other’s private life. Which suited both very well.

  George Ferris started work on a new book. Its working title was: What The County Records Office Can Do For You.

  And, of course, Laurence Hawker died. Working on the Bracketts report had only given him a brief remission from the inevitable. He lived less than three weeks after completing it.

  Carole was shocked. Only very near the end had she realized how ill he was; and with that knowledge came the realization that Jude must have been aware of his condition for a much longer time. Carole was confused between sympathy for Jude and resentment of her neighbour’s secretiveness. She didn’t like the feeling that she had been the victim of a conspiracy of silence, a subject of clandestine discussion at Woodside Cottage.

  Though inwardly anguished, the reaction to Laurence’s death that Jude presented to the world was one of serenity. Which confused Carole even more. They had been lovers, hadn’t they? Yet Jude didn’t behave as if she’d just lost the love of her life. Jude was very odd about relationships; and a lot of other things, come to that; around Jude nothing was ever cut and dried.

  Secretly, Carole felt relieved that Laurence was no longer a fixture in Woodside Cottage. And guilty for feeling relieved.

  To everyone’s surprise, Laurence Hawker turned out to have made elaborate plans for his own memorial service, which was to be a very traditional, religious one. Jude organized the event, in the London church he had specified, and there was rather an impressive turnout. Amongst a lot of spiky, combative-looking academics was a large number of women, many with beautiful Slavic cheekbones. Carole thought this was odd, but Jude didn’t mind at all.

  And as a final irony, a typical post-modernist joke, Laurence Hawker included in the order of service a reading of Esmond Chadleigh’s ‘Threnody for the Lost’.

  No grave, no lichened tombstone, graven plaque,

  No yew-treed cross beneath its cloak of moss,

  No sense but absence, unforgiving dark,

  The stretching void that is eternal loss.

  And almost everyone in the congregation mouthed the words and, yet to know any better, thought of the poet’s elder brother Graham, so tragically lost at Passchendaele.

  THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL

  The Hopwicke Country House Hotel is to host an event for the all-male society, the Pillars of Sussex, and Jude has been recruited to help look after the rowdy guests. But the next morning one young solicitor is absent from breakfast.

  When Jude heads for Nigel Ackford’s room, presuming he is feeling the effects of the night before, she is horrified to find him hanging from the beams of his four-poster bed . . .

  Was it suicide? The police are convinced it was, but Jude has her doubts. Enlisting the support of her neighbour, Carole, she makes some tentative enquiries. It soon transpires that the Pillars of Sussex are involved in a conspiracy of misinformation.

  ‘An irresistibly old-time mystery’

  Daily Mail

  The Hanging in the Hotel, the fifth novel in the Fethering Mysteries series, is published by Pan Books. The opening scenes follow here.

  Chapter One

  As the taxi entered the gates, Jude looked up at Hopwicke Country House Hotel, a monument to nostalgic pampering. The mansion had been built in the early eighteenth century by George Hopwicke, a young baronet who had increased his considerable inheritance by ‘the successes of his plantations in the West Indies’, or, in other words, by his profits from the slave trade. The main building was a perfectly proportioned cube, the ideal echoed in so many late twentieth-century developments of ‘exclusive Georgian town-houses’. The elegantly tall windows on the three floors at the front of the house looked down from the fringes of the South Downs, across the bungalow- and greenhouse-littered plain around Worthing, to the gunmetal glimmer of the English Channel.

  Stabling and utility buildings were behind the house, neatly shielded by tall hedges. The hundreds of acres in which George Hopwicke had built this testament to his taste and opulence had been sold off piecemeal for development over the centuries, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century only a four-acre buffer protected the upper-class elegance of the hotel from the encroachments of the ever-expanding English middle classes, and from the encroachments of the present. Even the brochure said, ‘Leave the twenty-first century behind when you step through our elegant portals.’

  It’s remarkable, Jude thought as the taxi nosed up the drive, how much nostalgia there is in England for things that never existed. To escape the present, the English like nothing better than to immerse themselves in an idealized past. She felt sure the people of other nations – or other nations whose peoples could afford the luxury of self-examination – also venerated the past, but not in the same way. Only in England would the rosy tints of retrospection be seen through the lens of social class.

  The taxi crunched to a halt at the furthest point of the gravel arc, which went on round to rejoin the road at a second set of tall metal gates. The semi-circle of grass the drive framed was laid out as a croquet lawn.

  Jude paid off the driver, without calculating how large a chunk the fare would take out of her evening’s earnings, and hurried through the classical portico into the hotel.

  New visitors were intended to notice the artfully artless displays of impedimenta that tidily littered the hallway, but Jude had seen them all before, so she didn’t pause to take in the coffin-like croquet box with the mallets spilling out, the randomly propped-up fishing rods, the brown-gutted tennis racquets in wooden presses, the splitting cricket bats and the crumpled leather riding boots. Nor did she linger to scan the walls for their hunting prints, mounted antlers, stuffed trout or ancient photographs of dead-looking tweedy men surveying carpets of dead birds.

  Everything in the displays of which Jude took no notice supported her theory about English nostalgia. Hopwicke Country House Hotel aspired to an image of leisured indolence, set in comforting aspic somewhere between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a world of field sports and tennis parties, of dainty teas on shaven lawns, of large slugs of brandy and soda before many-coursed dinners. It was a world in which nobody was so indelicate as to think about money, and in which all the boring stuff was done by invisible servants. It was a world that had never existed.

  But though the guests of Hopwicke Country House Hotel deep in their hearts were probably aware of this fact, like children suspending disbelief to their own advantage over the existence of Father Christmas, they willingly ignored it. None of the clientele, anyway, had the background which might qualify them to argue with the detail of the hotel’s ambiance. Real aristocrats, whose upbringing might have contained some elements of the effect being sought after, would never have dreamed of staying in such a place. American tourists, whose images of England were derived largely from books featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, found nothing at all discordant. And, though the trust-funded or City-bonus-rich young couples who made up the rest of the hotel’s guest list might occasionally assert themselves by sending the wine back, they were far too socially insecure to question the authenticity of the overall experience for which they paid so much over the odds. When they departed the hotel, they didn’t blanch as they flashed a precious-metal credit card over the bill. In that detail, the imag
e was sustained; no one was so indelicate as to appear to think about money.

  As to all the boring stuff being done by invisible servants, here the hotel was on less certain ground. Though that was certainly the effect to which the management aspired, they didn’t have at their disposal the vast armies of staff which would have ensured the clockwork precision running of an Edwardian country house. Economy dictated that there were never really enough bodies around to do everything that was required, that the hotel’s owner ended up doing far more menial work than she should have done and that, when one member of staff failed to turn up on time, chaos threatened.

  Which was why Jude had received an emergency call from the hotel’s owner that April afternoon. There was no one at the antique reception table as she hurried past, just a tiny brass bell to summon service. Jude was making for the kitchen at the end of the hall, but noticed a door opposite the bar entrance was open, and moved towards it.

  Steep steps led down to the hotel’s cellar. The lights were on. As Jude peered down, a familiar face looked up at her.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come!’

  ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Bloody waitresses! Stella’s cried off because she’s going out with some new man, but she promised me her daughter’d come in. Bloody kid rang in at quarter to four to say she couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘Didn’t say. Told me and rang off.’

  ‘Suppose you should be grateful she rang at all.’

  ‘Why? God, Stella’s going to get an earful when she next comes in!’

  ‘Don’t sack her.’ Jude’s voice was firm and cautionary. ‘You can’t afford to lose any more staff.’

  ‘No.’ Suzy Longthorne the hotel owner sighed, and held out two bottles of port. ‘Could you take these?’ She picked up two more, turned off the cellar light, came up the stairs and locked the door behind her. ‘Going to need a lot of port tonight,’ she said, and led the way through to the kitchen. Inside, she put the bottles down on the table and wearily coiled her long body into a chair.

  Even though she had thickened out around the neck, Suzy Longthorne remained a beautiful woman. It was still easy to see why she had graced so many magazine covers, been a desirable trophy for so many photographers and pop singers, been so frequently pursued and so frequently won. The famous hair, which had been through every latest style for nearly four decades, almost certainly now needed help to maintain its natural auburn, but looked good. The hazel eyes, though surrounded by a tracery of tiny lines, were still commanding. And the lithe, full-breasted figure seemed to have made no concessions to the years, though less of its toning now came from the gym than from the extraordinary effort of running Hopwicke Country House Hotel.

  Suzy was incapable of dressing badly. Other women in the same pale grey T-shirt, jeans and brown leather slip-on shoes would have looked ordinary, sloppy even. Suzy Longthorne could still have stepped straight onto a catwalk. On her even the blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron looked like a fashion accessory.

  In fact, a perfect photo shoot could have been done at that moment – the chatelaine of Hopwicke House in her kitchen. Like the rest of the hotel, the room had been restored by expensive designers to a high specification. Without losing its eighteenth-century proportions or its wide fireplace, the kitchen had been equipped with the latest culinary devices. Hidden lighting twinkled knowingly on surfaces of stainless steel and the copper bottoms of serried ranks of utensils.

  The two women had known each other since their late teens, when both had been picked up as potential ‘Faces of the Sixties’. But Jude’s modelling career had stuttered to a quick end. Though she didn’t lack for offers of work (among other things), a couple of long photo shoots and one catwalk show had brought home to her the incredible tedium of the job and she had moved sideways into acting in the blossoming world of fringe theatre and television.

  But Jude’s relationship with Suzy had endured. Not on a regular basis – frequently years would elapse between contacts – but it was always there. Usually, Suzy was the one who contacted Jude at the end of another of her high-profile relationships. And the tear-stained famous face would be buried in Jude’s increasingly ample shoulder, while the perfidies of men were once again catalogued and bold unrealizable ambitions for a relationship-free life were once again outlined.

  Suzy never seemed aware of what others had observed in their encounters with Jude – that they were the confiders, she the confidant. Jude rarely gave away much information about herself and, though her own emotional life had been at least as varied – if not as public – as Suzy’s, little of it was aired. There were friends to whom Jude did turn in moments of her own distress, but Suzy Longthorne was not one of them.

  Yet the relationship wasn’t one-sided. Suzy mattered to Jude. There was a core of honesty in the woman that appealed to her, together with a strong work ethic. And Jude was endlessly fascinated by the problems that accompanied the fulfilment of many women’s dream – that of being born incredibly beautiful.

  Suzy Longthorne had bought Hopwicke Country House Hotel with the proceeds from the breakdown of her longest marriage. For thirteen years she had stayed with Rick Hendry, as he metamorphosed from ageing rocker to pop entrepreneur to television producer, and as his tastes had shifted from the maturity of his wife to the pubescent charms of wannabee pop stars. Rick had made his name with a band called Zedrach-Kona, who produced supposedly profound sci-fi-influenced concept albums in the late seventies. The success of these, including the massive seller The Columns of Korfilia, had made him rich and famous for a year or two, then rich and forgotten. But in his fifties, Rick Hendry had found a new incarnation as an acerbic critic on Pop Crop, a television talent show which pitted the talents of manufactured boy and girl bands against each other. His own company, Korfilia Productions, made the show, and so once again for Rick Hendry the money was rolling in.

  By that time, being back in the public spotlight meant his ego no longer needed the support of marriage. The divorce settlement had been generous and Suzy had invested it all in Hopwicke House.

  The venture had started well. The conversion of the space from private dwelling to hotel had been expensively and expertly completed. The recollected glamour of its new owner gave the venue an air of chic. Well-heeled names from her much-publicized past booked in. Journalists who’d cut their cub-reporting teeth on interviews with Suzy Longthorne commissioned features for the newspapers and magazines they now edited. For a place that marketed itself as a discreet, quiet retreat, Hopwicke Country House Hotel got a lot of media coverage.

  Suzy was by no means a remote figurehead in the enterprise; she was a very hands-on manager. Her money was backing the project, and she had always kept an eye on what her money was up to. She was punctilious about the quality of staff – particularly the chefs – who worked for her. The media may have started the ball rolling, but word-of-mouth recommendations ensured its continuing motion.

  As the reputation of Hopwicke House grew, the hotel appeared more frequently in brochures targeted at the international super-rich – particularly Americans. Soon the breakfast tables in the conservatory resounded to Californian enquiries as to what a kipper might be, or tentative Texan queries about the provenance of black pudding. The hotel was included in an increasing number of upmarket tours, and played its part in nurturing the delusion of wealthy Americans that England had been created by P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie.

  So Suzy Longthorne had cleverly carved her niche, done the appropriate niche-marketing, and looked set fair to reap great riches from that niche.

  Until 11 September 2001. Among the many other effects of that momentous day, as Americans ceased to fly abroad and the bottom fell out of the tourism market, bookings at Hopwicke Country House Hotel immediately declined. Unfortunately, the transatlantic market was not alone in drying up. A collective guilt about over-indulgence had struck the Western world, and no amount of inducements in the form
of weekend breaks with suicidally low profit margins seemed able to reverse the downturn for Suzy’s business. She had been forced to abandon the exclusivity that had been her cachet and selling-point, and accept bookings from anyone who wished to stay.

  It was with this knowledge, on that April afternoon, that her friend Jude asked, a little tentatively, ‘Who have you got in tonight?’

  Suzy’s perfect nose wrinkled with distaste. ‘The Pillars of Sussex.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jude grimaced in sympathy. Though she had never met any members, she recognized the name. Like most British clubs and institutions, it had been founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Originally, under the grand name of ‘The Pillars of Society’, the group had been initiated for philanthropic purposes, and was still involved in local charity work and Christmas fund-raising. As with many such associations, however, the initial worthy intention soon took a back seat to procedures, rituals, ceremonies, elections, all of which had the same general aim: that those who had achieved membership of the Pillars should feel eternally superior to those who had not. Nothing had changed since an 1836 publication, Hints on Etiquette, had observed that, ‘the English are the most aristocratic democrats in the world; always endeavouring to squeeze through the portals of rank and fashion, and then slamming the door in the face of any unfortunate devil who may happen to be behind them.’

  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 organization. She had grown up suspecting that in the absence of female company men get increasingly childish, and experience had turned the suspicion into a conviction. She did not relish the evening of raucous misogyny ahead.