The Last Straw

by Paul Gitsham

  Holding up his warrant card, Warren introduced himself. Looking around, he noticed the faded décor and scratched tables. The source of the vacuuming came from the farthest corner where a plump young woman unenthusiastically ran the machine forward and backwards. With her back to the door and the white headphones of an iPod clearly adding their own din to that of the vacuum cleaner, Warren doubted she was even aware that an extra person was in the room.

  A strong smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air, which the landlord dismissed quickly. “Must ’ave left the back door open when I ’ad me fag break.” He casually tossed a bar towel over the burning cigarette in the half-filled ashtray on the bar top, clearly hoping that Warren hadn’t noticed.

  “What can I do fer you, Officer? If it’s about them sixth formers, they had fake ID, real good ’n all. ’Course, soon as I realised they was underage, like, I chucked them out.”

  Not before getting a few quid out of them first, I’ll bet, thought Warren. He decided not to point out that detective chief inspectors didn’t usually investigate reports of seventeen-year-old A-level students having a crafty pint.

  Now the man looked really worried and Warren wondered what he was hiding. Nothing to do with his case, he decided, but it might come in useful as leverage. By the looks of things, Mr Stribling was your basic dodgy landlord who kept his head above water by skirting around the law and turning a blind eye to some of the more dubious deals run by his customers, perhaps taking a small cut of the action for his trouble.

  “I’m sure you did your duty, Mr Stribling.”

  “Call me Larry, please. Every time you say Mr Stribling, I fink you’re talking to me old man!” His laugh was cut short by a wheezing cough that suggested that the person most inconvenienced by the smoking ban in this pub was the landlord. Or perhaps not, thought Warren, eyeing the faint wisps of smoke still curling from under the bar towel. He made a mental note to check out any 999 calls to the fire brigade later on.

  “I wonder if you recognise this man, drinking in here on the evening of Friday August fifth.”

  Stribling’s eyes narrowed and he barely glanced at the mugshot of Severino. “Nope, never seen him.”

  “You seem very sure of that, Larry. Are you certain? Perhaps you could take a closer look at the photo. It’s funny how when you take a closer look at something, you notice things that you didn’t before.” He glanced meaningfully at the smouldering ashtray. “Things that you realise that you need to do something about.”

  Stribling scowled, clearly uncomfortable about the idea of betraying one of his punters to the police and possibly by extension himself. Warren decided to make it easier on him. “Look, it hasn’t got anything to do with you or this bar. We’re simply trying to track the movements of this man and your pub came up as somewhere he might have stopped for a drink.”

  Stribling sighed, but pulled the photo over anyway. Plucking a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, he squinted hard at the photo. “Eleven days is a long time ago, Chief Inspector, and Friday nights are our busiest night.” He continued looking at the photo, a frown puckering his forehead. “I have to say that he does look a bit familiar. Last Friday, you say…yeah, definitely. He was here for a few hours. I remember ’cause he sat at the bar, getting in the way of people trying to get served. I was gonna tell him to move, but he was spending a fair bit, you know. Most of the punters were students here for my Friday night drinks promotion. By the time I’ve paid the duty and VAT and taxes, the profit on each pint is two-thirds of fuck-all. He was drinking good stuff, though — probably made more profit from him than ten of those bleedin’ students.”

  Warren felt a surge of excitement. “Can you remember if he was here with anyone else?”

  Stribling shook his head. “On his own at the bar, like I said. Looked bloody miserable, to be honest.”

  “Any idea why?”

  Stribling looked at him incredulously. “Not a bloody clue. This isn’t Cheers, you know, where everyone knows your name. None of my business what’s upset him. I just serve the drinks.”

  Warren persisted. “And he didn’t meet anyone here?”

  Stribling shrugged helplessly. “I wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest. I was mostly serving down the other end of the bar. Although, come to think of it, he did eventually move from the bar to one of the tables in the corner. He might have gone over with someone.”

  Warren struggled to hide his frustration; all he had so far was that Severino had gone to the pub a week before Tunbridge’s murder. He tried to picture the bar that night. Heaving with students guzzling pints of cheap lager, whilst Severino sat alone on a bar stool getting steadily more drunk. Warren looked at the bar again. It was long and straight, closed at both ends to deter cheeky, DIY pint-pourers, but with hinged lids to allow staff easy access to and from the area behind the bar. Two modern tills with touchscreens meant that servers didn’t have to turn their backs to the customers when they took their money. Two tills…

  “Was there anybody else working that Friday?”

  Stribling looked at him as if he was soft in the head. “Yeah, ’course. Can’t run a bar on my own, can I? Friday night it’s our Kel behind the bar and Dazza collecting glasses.”

  “May I speak to them, please?” asked Warren, deliberately keeping his tone polite.

  Stribling shrugged, then called out to the young woman with the vacuum cleaner.

  “Kel!”

  Nothing.

  “Kel!”

  Still nothing.

  Marching around the bar, Stribling reached out and tugged on one of the leads. The earphone popped out and she jumped in surprise.

  “Bloody ’ell, Dad! What did you do that for?”

  “’Cause you’re always plugged into that sodding thing. Could be a bloody air raid and you’d never know anyfink about it.”

  Or a fire alarm, thought Warren, noticing that the abandoned cigarette still seemed to be doing its thing. He thought he’d read somewhere that modern cigarettes were supposed to go out if left unattended. He wondered how long that was supposed to take.

  The young woman was about nineteen or twenty, Warren guessed, although it was a bit difficult to tell under all of the piercings and white and black face make-up. He supposed she was what kids these days called a Goth or was it an emo now? Warren remembered them from when he was her age, although he and his mates had just referred to them as miserable buggers.

  He forced a smile and introduced himself, showing her Severino’s photograph. As she spoke to him Stribling disappeared off to find ‘Dazza’, the third member of this family enterprise.

  Squinting at the picture with the one eye that wasn’t obscured by her jet-black fringe, she nodded and smiled briefly.

  “Yeah, I remember him.”. She pointed at a bar stool in front of the till nearest the front door. “He sat there all night, drinking. Didn’t say very much, just stared at his drink. One of those dark, moody Mediterranean types.” Clearly the sort of man she found attractive, Warren thought, amused.

  “Did he meet anyone here?”

  She frowned, then brightened as she remembered, then frowned again as the memory clearly irritated her. Warren hoped for her sake that she never took up poker; hiding what she was thinking was not one of this girl’s strong suits.

  “Yeah, some blonde bimbo sat herself down next to him late in the evening. She clearly wasn’t his type—” Warren discounted this observation as potentially biased “—but she wouldn’t give up. Eventually they moved to the corner over there.” She pointed to a small, circular wooden table flanked by short, cushioned stools. “They had a couple more drinks and then left.” She sniffed her disapproval. “He was clearly pissed — she shouldn’t have taken advantage like that.”

  Warren fought the urge to smile; he doubted that Severino had felt taken advantage of. And if he was, he doubted that he would care too much. Then his amusement disappeared like a puff of smoke as he considered that Severino might well have
been taken advantage of in more ways than he could have imagined at the time.

  “Did you know her at all?”

  “No, but I know the type. Skinny, blonde, big tits.” Everything Kel wasn’t, thought Warren, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the girl.

  “Can you remember any more details?”

  Kel squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to remember one, single customer from several days previously. “I think she was wearing a pink top and jeans.”

  “How old would you say she was? Was she tall?”

  “Probably about twenty, average height.” She shook her head. “That’s all, sorry.” Warren smiled encouragingly as he handed her his card. “Thank you. If you remember anything else at all, no matter how trivial, please call me.”

  As Kel returned to work Stribling reappeared, followed by a young lad of about seventeen, presumably ‘Dazza’. The lad was pale and pimply, with a spectacular case of bed-head. The T-shirt he wore above the tracksuit bottoms had clearly been slept in and was somewhat vintage, judging by the smell. The logo proclaimed that the owner was experiencing the same shit but on a different day.

  “This is my Darren. We call him ‘Dazza’ or ‘Daz’, like the washing powder. We was gonna call him Ariel but that’s a girl’s name.” The pause for a laugh stretched uncomfortably.

  “I suppose you could have named him Percival and called him Percil for short,” suggested Warren, unable to help himself. Everyone looked at him blankly. Warren decided not to comment that it was a ‘Bold’ choice of name for someone so unused to a washing machine.

  Stribling continued, “He helps us out if it’s busy — just collecting glasses, of course,” he added hastily. Warren pushed the photo across.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember him. Sat on his own all night before some bird suddenly appeared out of nowhere and before you know it they was off in the corner and getting all cosy.” Dazza had clearly been impressed by Severino’s quick work.

  “Can you remember anything about the woman?”

  Dazza didn’t even pause. “Oh, yeah, she was well fit. I served her a couple of times.” Warren pretended not to notice the lad’s slip-up, although the glare from his father suggested that words would be had about what not to say in front of police officers. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember specifics, although he was fairly confident that he’d remember her if he saw her again. None of the bar staff knew her name or could remember seeing her before that night or since. The bar didn’t have CCTV, although there were some council-owned cameras further up the street that might have caught an image.

  Thanking them for their time, Warren headed for the front door, before pausing briefly.

  “Oh, by the way. You might want to deal with that sooner rather than later.” He pointed to the smoking bar towel covering the smouldering ashtray, which had now caught alight.

  Chapter 27

  The next stop for Warren was Mr G’s nightclub. Warren had secured a good parking space near to the White Bear, so he decided to stretch his legs and walk to the club. At a brisk pace, he was there in just over five minutes. Even allowing for a slow, drunken stagger, it was obvious that the club was within reasonable walking distance from the pub.

  Mr G’s was set slightly back off a side street and took up two floors. The ground-floor bar was already open, although the half-dozen customers visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows were sitting at small, round metal tables drinking coffee rather than beer. The neon ‘Mr G’s’ sign above the door was turned off and, instead, wooden chalk-boards advertising the soup-of-the-day and the lunch-time special flanked the entrance.

  Stepping inside, Warren introduced himself to the young woman serving behind the bar and asked to see the manager. A few moments later, a youthful-looking man in a pair of light chino trousers and a pale-blue short-sleeved shirt came down the stairs. Walking briskly over to Warren without any hesitation, he stuck his hand out and introduced himself as Jack Baker. Responding to Warren’s request for a private word, he led the way up the stairs to the main club.

  There was something not quite right about an empty nightclub, with the lights on in the middle of the day, Warren reflected. It seemed empty and lifeless. It reminded him of the times he’d visited Susan’s school after home-time or during the holidays. Without the crackle and fizzle of youthful energy, the building seemed almost lonely. Of course, more than one teacher had commented that the school ran a lot more efficiently without the pupils getting in the way and interrupting the paperwork.

  The club was fairly straightforward and unpretentious. Most of the floor-space was given over to a large, square, empty dance floor, surrounded on three sides by a raised dais with tables and chairs. A boxed-in DJ booth faced the bar, now shuttered, that took up most of the fourth side. The room smelt faintly of stale beer and air-freshener. An elderly lady in an apron was mopping the floor by the DJ’s box.

  Flanking the bar were two doors. One with a toilet sign, the other with ‘Staff Only’. Leading Warren through the second door, Baker turned right and entered an office. Much to Warren’s surprise, the office was light and airy with large windows overlooking a generously sized pub garden. Two desks that wouldn’t be out of place in a bank or a solicitor’s office occupied most of the floor-space. In the farthest corner from the door a large, steel safe, the size of a king-size refrigerator, dominated the wall. To Warren’s astonishment, the closed door of the safe was adorned with hand-painted children’s pictures and the artist responsible for the masterpieces was sitting in the corner on several sheets of newspaper cheerfully splattering paint all over another sheet of A4.

  Baker smiled at Warren’s look of surprise. “Not quite what you were expecting, Detective Chief Inspector?”

  Regaining his composure, Warren shook his head. “I have to say, Mr Baker, that I have been in the back offices of many pubs and clubs in my time and the word that usually springs to mind is ‘dingy’. This is somewhat different.”

  Baker laughed good-naturedly. “I should hope so. I’m a businessman first and foremost, not a publican. I have a degree in business and law and spent most of the first ten years after university working for blue-chip companies in London. I’ve tried to bring some of that ethos with me to Mr G’s.”

  “So how does a London businessman end up in the middle of Hertfordshire, running a nightclub?” asked Warren curiously.

  Baker waved a hand vaguely in the air. “Sometimes life just leads you where you least expect it to. In London I had my own office and secretary and a view of the river, but I wasn’t really enjoying myself. My Dad, George — that’s where the ‘Mr G’ came from — ran this place for thirty years and it was just like you’d expect. Dingy. I never thought I’d ever have anything to do with it. Anyway, he dropped dead of a heart attack about five years ago and I inherited the place, just as I was starting to fall out of love with London. I was worried about Mum being all alone and I’d been rekindling an old friendship from my childhood, so I decided to jack the job in in London and come back here to run this place. I married the friend and decided I didn’t want to move away from where I grew up.

  “To be honest, for the first twelve-months this place was a bloody mill-stone around my neck and I hated it. The books were a mess, the place was a dive with a real reputation as a Friday-night meat market. We had drug problems and frankly it was the sort of nightclub you’d have had to drag me kicking and screaming to on a night out normally.

  “In the end, I decided enough was enough and I closed us down for two months. I sacked the door staff, who were responsible for half the drug-dealing anyway, and turned downstairs into a nice, decent bar suitable for a quiet drink or a coffee at lunchtime and a meeting place in the evening. Upstairs, I just decided to go back to basics, making the dance-floor as big as possible and concentrating on giving people what they want: decent music to dance to on the weekend and live music and comedy to listen to during the week.

  “As you can see, I run this place as I would any other busine
ss. The one thing I was missing about working in London was my office. So I gutted the old office, painted the walls white instead of black, got rid of the topless calendar on the back of the door and entered the twenty-first century.” He nodded towards the toddler in the corner. “I even bring my daughter to work a couple of days a week to save on childcare. Marlene, who sits over there, was my dad’s assistant for years and I kept her on. She treats Isla here like another grandkid.” At the mention of her name, the little girl looked over and gave a big, gap-toothed smile, before resuming her painting. “I don’t think anyone expected me to succeed, to be honest, even my mum. But last year we turned a profit for the first time in nearly a decade. By the end of this year, the club will have made enough to pay off the second mortgage Dad took out on his and Mum’s house to keep this bloody place open.”

  Warren was impressed and said so, before getting down to business. The contrast with Larry Stribling couldn’t have been greater. Without even being asked, Baker offered to call up the security footage of the night in question.

  “One of the things I decided to change was the club’s relationship with the police. I’m not saying my old man was a crook, but he skirted the law and regarded the police as something of a hindrance rather than a partner. As a club we have a proactive approach: drug dealers are shopped immediately; under-age drinkers are photographed and banned and they can’t come back until they have proof of age; and we keep our eyes and ears open for any dodgy booze and fags and report it to the police. We’re also helping set up a zero-tolerance zone with other pubs and entertainment venues like the cinema — anybody banned from one place has their photo taken and it’s immediately circulated around everywhere else. We’ve got about two dozen people who can’t get served in any of the pubs in the scheme. Our goal is to extend the system across the town centre.”

  Watching the footage was just a question of accessing the digital video files held on the club’s computer system. They kept footage for the previous month, before archiving it. As Baker pointed out, the cost of storing digital imagery was so low these days, they might as well. You never knew when it might be useful.