The Sinking Admiral

by The Detection Club

  ‘A knock on the head, you mean? Self-inflicted? No chance.’

  ‘I didn’t say self-inflicted.’

  Cole grinned. ‘You watch too much crime on television. It isn’t like that in the real world. Don’t forget we’ve got the suicide note.’

  ‘The questionable suicide note,’ Amy said.

  ‘All right. Let’s play it your way. The only people who know about the existence of this note are your good self and the officer who attended the scene last night. Have you mentioned it to anyone else?’

  She hesitated for a nanosecond. She had mentioned it to Ben. But she didn’t want to complicate things, so she said, ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t. This is how we root out guilty parties. If someone else concocted the note, as you seem to be implying, they’ll give themselves away at some stage. Clever, eh?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘And just to be quite certain, we’ll be fingerprinting the paper the note was written on. Forensics can get prints off anything these days.’

  Amy caught her breath. ‘Mine could be on it. I lifted the envelope from the tarpaulin.’

  ‘But they won’t be on the letter inside. The only prints we can expect to find are those of the person who wrote it and the officer who opened it. If, God forbid, we find any others, that individual will have some explaining to do.’

  Amy was silent.

  ‘So this will be our little secret, Miss Walpole. Are you with me?’

  She gave a nod, but her mind was in turmoil. Touch as little as possible at a crime scene. If only she’d listened to her own inner voice.

  ‘Another thing,’ Cole said. ‘I want you to print something now on your computer. We noticed you’ve got one in your office.’

  ‘Print what?’

  ‘A notice in large letters saying the pub is closed until further notice owing to the sad death of the owner.’

  Having printed the note as requested, and closed the door on the detectives, noting incidentally that the younger of the two looked as good from the back as he did from the front – then scolding herself for even thinking that when she’d seen Fitz dead not twelve hours ago – Amy let Meriel know that she might as well have the day off.

  ‘With the pub closed until the police decide otherwise, there’s nothing else we can do.’

  Meriel was not happy, and, looking around the kitchen, half a dozen dishes seemingly on the go at once, a massive number of vegetables already prepped, Amy could see why.

  ‘You don’t usually work this hard on a Tuesday, Meriel.’

  ‘We don’t usually have a film crew in the bar dragging in all and sundry, and hungry with it. We don’t usually have detectives eating my full English. And I don’t usually have the chance to… to… oh never mind. Get out of my way and I’ll try to salvage some of this. They’re going have to let us open once they confirm it’s suicide.’

  Amy turned in the door. ‘How do you know about that?’

  Meriel smiled. ‘Little pitchers, big ears. And that,’ she pointed to the extractor above the big catering oven, ‘still leads into the old chimneys, they’re all connected. When it’s turned off, I can hear half the conversations in the bar, clear as day. Now if you don’t mind, you may not have anything to do with the bar closed, but I have no intention of letting this lot go to waste. It’ll do for funeral-baked meats, if nothing else.’

  Amy used the locked front door as an opportunity to give the bar a good clean. The old chairs, the scuffed walls, the tables with their ingrained sticky beer would also be put to use for the wake, she was sure of that, it wasn’t as if there was anywhere else to go after the funeral – once they were allowed to have the funeral – she might as well make the bar as presentable as possible. She shook her head, feeling tears coming on again, smarting at the back of her eyes. No, she would not cry. Last night was bad enough, she wasn’t going to let it all get to her in broad daylight as well. A deep breath, a bucket of hot water, and a brutally effective and pungent spray cleaner, that was more use than tears right now.

  As Amy got to work she thought how odd death was, the way someone, anyone – loved or hated, it didn’t matter – just suddenly stopped. The incredible cessation of life. No wonder people had invented religion to make sense of it, nothing else did. She scrubbed harder, as old memories, unbidden, threatened to well up. She’d trained herself to be tougher than this, not to look back, not to dwell. It wasn’t even as if Fitz had been a good boss, his business skills were appalling, but he had been kind to her when she’d needed help, and she’d not forget that. The arrival of not one, but two, good-looking men in town was not going to let her forget Fitz’s kindness, even if most people had been all too ready to consider him a bit of a joke. There had been much more to Fitz than most people saw, Amy wasn’t even sure she knew what that more might be, but she knew he wasn’t just the village drunkard, the old buffoon. And he was no suicide. Whatever he’d been planning for his ‘Last Hurrah’, it had been something he’d personally found thrilling, something that had generated that twinkle in his eye. She threw away the second dirty bucket of water and rinsed the sink. Fitz had been planning something all right, but it most certainly was not suicide.

  Amy was halfway back to her cottage, the wind no less brutal than it had been in the middle of the night, the sky only slightly less lowering, when a new thought occurred to her. Ben Milne and his cameraman Stan had been filming most of yesterday afternoon. Cutaways of the pub, close-ups of the dust caught in the nautical ceiling decoration – ‘for atmosphere only, love’, Stan had assured her, with a wink to Ben – long shots of the desolate seascape beyond the small windows, and plenty of vox pops, where Ben – as producer-presenter – had his own style, simultaneously enthused but also laid-back, just this side of too cocky, yet not quite as charming as he no doubt thought himself. They must have taken at least a couple of hours of video footage, and not all of it could have been her own or Meriel’s cleavage, despite Stan’s obvious interest in the female form. She’d been too busy with the influx of non-regulars, all of them keenly hoping to get caught on camera, to pay much attention to the people who’d visited Fitz yesterday afternoon, but Amy was aware that the stairs up to the Bridge had been busier than usual. And somewhere in all that footage there might well be a clue to what else had been planned yesterday, something that would make the police look more closely into their suicide theory, something that would help her help them – even if they clearly did not want her help.

  Amy turned on her heel and headed back to the pub. The last she’d seen of him, Ben was stomping upstairs to his room, with dire threats about suing the pub if the promised Wi-Fi didn’t work, and how the hell was he supposed to copy all their film in the time the police had given him. Amy knew enough about technology to know he needed neither Wi-Fi nor a great deal of time to copy from the camera memory card to his own laptop’s hard disc or a memory stick, but she’d assumed he was using the tantrum to get himself off and back into bed, making up for lost sleep and last night’s hangover.

  She let herself back into the pub and checked in the kitchen. She was pleased to see Meriel appeared to have tidied everything well enough, and then went upstairs to Ben’s door. She knocked, and was surprised when Ben opened up almost immediately.

  ‘About bloody time,’ he said, walking away, neither looking at her, nor removing his headphones, ‘just put it on the bed, I asked for that over an hour ago.’

  ‘Asked for what?’ Amy said, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Huh?’ Ben turned and was clearly surprised to see Amy. His frown burrowed even further into his forehead for a moment, until he remembered he was frowning at Amy, and he fancied her, or he would do if she’d shown any sign of fancying him back, as most women did. He tried – too late – to offer his lopsided grin, the one his viewers seemed to find so attractive.

  ‘Who were you expecting?’ Amy asked.

  ‘That woman, in the kitchen, the one who thinks she’s the next volup
tuous telly cook.’

  ‘Meriel,’ Amy prompted

  ‘Merry hell, yes.’ Ben chuckled, pleased with his own joke, no doubt planning something similar for the documentary voiceover. ‘I went down over an hour ago, you were scrubbing hell out of that old table in the corner, I asked her if I could have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. If I have to waste good filming time copying stuff for the police, I might as well have some food after all. She said she’d bring me something up.’

  ‘She must have forgotten.’

  ‘I thought she wanted to get a series out of me?’

  ‘Maybe she’s realised you don’t do “shows”,’ Amy said with a grin, copying Ben’s earlier tone to the policemen.

  ‘Yeah, or maybe she’s gone off to kill a fatted calf and present it to me, apple in mouth and fat glistening.’

  ‘When I last saw her she was putting the stuff she’d been prepping into the freezer. The police have insisted the pub’s closed for business.’

  ‘They’re not about to turn me out of my room, are they?’

  ‘No. Actually, another thought… Fish market.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tuesday. Fish market, well, more of an old transit van, comes all along the coastal villages, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, around about this time of day. That’s where Meriel’ll probably be.’

  ‘Whole poached sea bass I’ll be getting then?’

  ‘More than likely.’

  They both smiled, and then Amy was suddenly aware that she was standing in Ben’s bedroom, the unmade bed astonishingly inviting, no doubt due to her lack of sleep, not at all to the lopsided grin Ben was trying out on her again.

  ‘I was wondering…’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  The grin again; Amy wondered if his cheek ever ached. ‘The police are pretty sure Fitz committed suicide.’

  ‘The note’s a bit of a clue there.’

  No grin this time, and Amy ignored him. ‘But I doubt Fitz even knew where the envelopes where in the office, let alone how to type and print a note as well as an envelope. He is – he was – a complete technophobe. Actually, worse than that, not phobic, he honestly didn’t care, one way or the other, he wasn’t interested in learning. I don’t believe he wrote that note.’

  ‘Then…’

  ‘Then someone else did. And that someone else may well have visited Fitz yesterday afternoon, the place was heaving, I have no idea who went up and down those steps to the Bridge. But what I do know is that Fitz was very much himself, and truly excited about what he had planned for his “Last Hurrah” as he called it. Something happened between him and one of his visitors – maybe more than one of them, I don’t know – but something must have happened. Either something that did make him kill himself – even though I can’t see him doing that, or…?’

  ‘Or indeed. And you think some of my footage might show who went up to see the old man?’

  ‘I do.’

  Try as he might, Ben just couldn’t stop his dark eyes lighting up. Amy watched him as he worked it all out, in the sharpest televisual terms, she was sure – a derelict old pub, a ‘character’ of a publican, a potential suicide that segued neatly into murder. She couldn’t really blame him, he’d come all this way hoping to make a perfectly ordinary little programme that gently mocked local characters and made people up and down the country feel better about their own stolid lives from the safety of their own soft sofas, and now he’d been handed a real life actual drama. No wonder his dark eyes gleamed. To his credit, he didn’t leap up and punch his fist in the air – not that the low beams of the room would have allowed it – he simply nodded.

  ‘Good point. We can have a look if you like – as soon as I’ve given the copy of the footage to the police. And maybe we could have a coffee and a bite to eat while we do it?’ He looked around the bedroom, perhaps thinking of it as a suitable venue for their investigation, but something he saw in Amy’s eye prevented him from making the suggestion. ‘I’ll bring the laptop down to the bar and get set up, while you go and see what treats the lovely Meriel might have left in the fridge.’

  Amy went back down to the kitchen, while Ben quickly gathered together his gear. At least her suggestion had wiped the lopsided grin off his face.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Greta sighed as she put the final tick against Cherry’s maths homework and added the sheet to the pile on the right of the desk. This was a time of day Greta usually liked. Alice – Dr Alice Kennedy – was conducting her Wednesday evening surgery; the shoulder of local lamb was roasting, with a selection of Moroccan-spiced vegetables softening under it, and sending delectable vapours upstairs; a particularly flavoursome Cabernet Sauvignon was breathing; and the setting sun was driving a magnificent, red-gold track across the dark sea.

  Marking Year Nine’s maths should have been a reassuring task. Here in these dog-eared books everything was either right or wrong. Nearly right, as she always told her pupils at the start of the year, was wrong. But tonight the familiar satisfaction just wouldn’t come. Too many uncomfortable ideas were swilling about Greta’s mind.

  The Admiral was dead. You couldn’t forget that if you had any sort of human kindness in you. And Greta had quite a bit. He’d turned into a buffoon in the last few years, but there had never been any malice in him; and in the old days he’d been generous and funny, as well as reasonably good-looking. Now he was dead.

  In the village they were all saying the Admiral had done it himself because of the pub’s debts, but that was bonkers. In spite of the buffoonery, Fitz had never lost his essential decency, and no one who cared about other people would commit suicide without leaving a note. No way, as the girls would say. And so far the police hadn’t revealed whether there had been a note or not.

  You’d have to be incredibly angry to kill yourself in a way that would land unjust suspicion on everyone you’d left behind. You’d have to be incredibly unhappy, too. Greta gazed at the heavenly view outside the small attic window of her study and couldn’t really bear the thought that Fitz’s bluff public manner might have hidden dreadful suffering.

  Don’t think about it now, she told herself. It won’t do you any good. And you’ve got to finish the marking before supper or you’ll never be able to relax. And that wouldn’t be fair on Alice, not when she’s dealing with so many patients on the brink. She needs you calm and supportive just now.

  Greta reached for the next worksheet and shuddered at the name written on it. Calm and supportive were not likely characteristics in anyone who’d become one of Tracy Crofts’ victims. Even so, Greta made herself pay proper attention to Tracy’s proof of Pythagoras’ theorem. However irritating the child was, her work deserved to be taken seriously. It wasn’t bad. Tracy had a brain, which made her shenanigans even more irritating. And dangerous.

  In normal circumstances, Greta wouldn’t have wasted a second’s anxiety on Tracy’s idiotic threat. After all, Greta and Alice had been a fixture in Crabwell for the past seven years, most people knew they were a couple, and no one bothered about them. As Fitz himself had once said, they didn’t frighten the horses. Besides which, Alice was the best GP for miles around, and Greta had earned a great reputation for getting her girls through GCSE maths and on to higher things. There was no one else around here who’d bother to run the local Girl Guides either, and someone had to do something to keep the girls occupied and thinking of something other than…

  She dropped Tracy’s work on the desk and covered her face with both hands, rubbing the palms up and down her cheeks. The gesture did nothing for her headache, or the sore patch inside her cheek, where her grinding teeth so often caught the soft flesh.

  Someone needed to save Tracy from herself, and her feckless parents weren’t likely to do it, so Greta had tried. She’d talked to Tracy in a quiet moment on the last camping trip, but the attempt had failed.

  Greta understood the difficulty without any trouble at all. Tracy was being driven to a quite unusual degree by her teenag
e hormones, or evolution, the selfish gene, or whatever you wanted to call it. All her instincts were telling her to polish up her charms and display them as clearly as she could until a suitable sperm donor picked her as his chosen receptacle. She had already got a reputation around Crabwell for being at it like a rabbit. But Tracy wasn’t a rabbit, or a praying mantis, or even a fur seal. She was a human being with seventy or eighty more years of life to come. If those years were to be remotely happy, she was going to have to learn to know herself, find fulfilling work of her own, and only then choose the mate with whom she could reproduce her genes.

  All Greta’s recommendations of keeping her options open, getting good enough results to gain access to a good university and so have the chance of an interesting career made Tracy laugh like the hyena she wasn’t. Greta could almost see the thought bubbles coming out of Tracy’s head about poor old bags and disappointed lesbians. She offered Tracy her copy of Gaudy Night, hoping that Dorothy L. Sayers’s demonstration of the importance of doing your own work and not confining yourself to life as someone else’s helpmeet might do the trick.

  She herself had found such succour in Sayers’s good sense when she’d been faced with an awful decision years and years ago that she couldn’t believe anyone would reject it. But that attempt had been a failure too. And it was after Tracy had spurned the novel that she’d made her silly threat. Silly but horrible.

  ‘If you tell anyone about me,’ she had said, ‘I’ll tell them all that you’re just jealous because I wouldn’t let you touch me.’

  No one in Crabwell would pay any attention. But if the sleazy man from the telly encouraged Tracy to say it on camera there could be real trouble. These days no one would – or should – ignore any suggestion of paedophilia, and the fact that there was no evidence could make everything worse. The police would have to be involved, and, as far as Greta could see from the various stories that had recently emerged in the news, they’d publicise her name and the accusation in the hope that other victims would come forward. She could be on police bail for years until they realised that there were no victims at all, and never had been, and that they’d been manipulated by a naughty little trollop, who needed to distract attention from her own carryings-on.