The Penultimate Chance Saloon

by Simon Brett

  THE PENULTIMATE

  CHANCE SALOON

  Simon Brett

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 97814713 09113

  Copyright © Simon Brett 2005

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  Simon Brett was born in 1945 in England and studied at Wad- ham College, Oxford. He has worked for the BBC as both writer and producer, and later for London Weekend Television. Mr. Brett has written and edited children’s books, and his humour can be found in all his works and detective series. A number of his works have been adapted to television and film, including After Henry, No Commitments, How to be a Little Sod, and A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine. A former president of the British Crime Writers Association and The Society of Authors and presently president of the Detection Club, Mr. Brett lives in the South Downs of England with his wife and three children.

  By the same Author

  THE CHARLES PARIS MYSTERIES

  Cast, In Order of Disappearance (1975)

  So Much Blood (1976)

  Star Trap (1977)

  An Amateur Corpse (1978)

  A Comedian Dies (1979)

  The Dead Side of the Mike (1980)

  Situation Tragedy (1981)

  Murder Unprompted (1982)

  Murder in the Title (1983)

  Not Dead, Only Resting (1984)

  Dead Giveaway (1985)

  What Bloody Man Is That? (1987)

  A Series of Murders (1989)

  Corporate Bodies (1991)

  A Reconstructed Corpse (1993)

  Sicken and So Die (1995)

  Dead Room Farce (1998)

  THE MRS PARGETER MYSTERIES

  A Nice Class of Corpse (1986)

  Mrs., Presumed Dead (1988)

  Mrs. Pargeters Package (1990)

  Mrs. Pargeters Pound Of Flesh (1992)

  Mrs. Pargeters Plot (1996)

  Mrs. Pargeters Point of Honour (1998)

  THE FETHERING MYSTERIES

  The Body on the Beach (2000)

  Death on the Downs (2001)

  The Torso in the Town (2002)

  Murder in the Museum (2003)

  The Hanging in the Hotel (2004)

  The Witness at the Wedding (2005)

  OTHER WORKS

  The Child-Owner s Handbook (1983)

  Molesworth Rites Again (1983)

  A Shock to the System (1984)

  Bad Form (1984)

  Dead Romantic (1985)

  A Box of Tricks (1985)

  People-Spotting (1985)

  The Wastepaper Basket Archive (1986)

  The Three Detectives and the Missing Superstar (1986)

  The Three Detectives and the Knight in Armor (1987)

  How to Stay Topp (1987)

  After Henry (1987)

  The Booker Book (1989)

  The Christmas Crimes at Puzzel Manor (1991)

  How to Be A Little Sod (1992)

  Murder in Play (1994)

  Look Who's Walking (1994)

  The Hypochondriac s Dictionary of III Health, with Dr. Sarah Brewer (1994)

  Singled Out (1995)

  Mr. Quigley s Revenge (1995)

  Not Another Little Sod! (1997)

  Crime Writers and Other Animals (1998)

  Little Red Riding Hood (1998)

  Silhouette (1998)

  Sleeping Beauty (1999)

  Crime in Rhyme, And Other Mysterious Fragments (2000)

  Lines of Enquiry, And Other Literary Oddities (2002)

  Baby Tips for Dads (2004)

  Baby Tips for Mums(2005)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Faber Book of Useful Verse (1981)

  Take a Spare Truss (1983)

  The Faber Book of Parodies (1984)

  The Detection Collection, Ed. (2005)

  The Faber Book of Diaries (1987)

  WITH FRANK MUIR

  Frank Muir Goes Into... (1978)

  The Second Frank Muir Goes Into... (1979)

  The Third Frank Muir Goes Into...(1980)

  Frank Muir on Children (1980)

  The Fourth Frank Muir Goes Into... (1981)

  Frank Muir Presents the Book of Comedy Sketches (1982)

  To the lovely – but sadly late –

  Susan Hill, with whom I discussed the idea of writing a Gaga Saga

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter One

  ... and, by way of contrast,

  a woman in Cardiff divorced her husband

  on the grounds that he never went anywhere

  with her. He was not present at the hearing.

  One of the great discoveries of humankind is post-menopausal sex – the love that dares not speak its name terribly loudly when younger people are present. The thought of wrinkled and wizened bodies engaging in that kind of activity is repellent ... until, of course, its your body that’s wrinkled and wizened. Then entirely different values apply.

  So Bill Stratton found out, when, on the verge of his sixtieth birthday, his wife Andrea left him for another man.

  They had had what he would have described as a happy marriage. Only when Andrea spelled out, in great detail, her reasons for leaving him, did he realise that he was alone in that view.

  They were different, he’d always known that, and if ever interviewed on the subject – as he occasionally had been – he would have said that the very differences between them were what made their marriage strong. Andrea’s view, he subsequently discovered, had been at variance with his for quite a long time. Since the second week of the honeymoon, according to her, but he thought she was exaggerating.

  Surely, he’d said, it’s not possible to spend nearly forty years married to someone you’re convinced is the wrong person. Andrea assured him that it was entirely possible.

  Her main criticism of him was that he was shallow. He took this on board to some extent, but he reckoned he probably wasn’t deep enough to understand it fully. He had, after all, virtually made a career out of triviality.

  Bill Stratton had been mildly famous, and he’d had a fairly easy ride. Having found his mild fame as a television newsreader, he had never been under the illusion that this was a particularly taxing role in life. His looks were good enough (in spite of a slightly crooked smile), his personality was amiable enough, and he had the ability to deepen his voice and look as if he was really suffering when there was a disaster to announce.

  He had even gained the vacuous honour of a catchphrase. The news editors
of his day were keen to end their bulletins on a light note, and would trawl the international media for amusing snippets, which Bill Stratton would introduce with a wry smile, followed by his trademark, and, by way of contrast...’ The phrase increased his recognition factor, and developed some surprisingly lucrative spin-offs.

  Never did Bill attempt to dignify his profession by claiming that it had any great importance in the scheme of things, or brought any particular benefit to humanity. On forms he put down his profession as ‘Journalist’ – and even had an NUJ card to prove it – but he knew that what he did could not really be dignified by the name of journalism. He just read an autocue. Someone had to do the job, and he was the lucky guy who’d got it.

  The rewards were extraordinarily generous, given the amount of effort involved. There had been a stage, early in his career, when he had tried to justify his employers’ largesse to earnest friends of Andrea (and Andrea didn’t have any friends who weren’t earnest). He’d said he was paid for the responsibility, for what might happen if terrorists took over the studio while he was live on air, an eventuality for which he had to be ready at all times. But he soon gave up. The argument wasn’t even convincing him, and given that all Andrea’s earnest friends worked at some level of the National Health Service, he knew, when it came to moral high ground, he hadn’t got a leg to stand on. Besides, his was not a particularly strong character. He knew if terrorists did take over the studio while he was live on air, he would abjectly read out any demands or manifestos they told him to.

  Bill Stratton was by nature obedient. He had a sense of duty. This wasn’t spontaneous, but had been inculcated into him by a strong mother and a minor public school education. There were things that you should do, and things that you shouldn’t do. He had been born just too early for his adolescence to be much affected by the sixties, when a lot of the things you shouldn’t do became things you should do. Growing up in a provincial town, for Bill the excesses of Carnaby Street were the stuff of newspapers and news bulletins. He didn’t see any evidence of a new liberalism in the people around him. The Swinging Sixties were supposed to be happening, but like many potentially exciting things in his life, they seemed to be happening somewhere else.

  At nineteen, while studying history and politics at a university that did not aspire to dreaming spires, he had met Andrea, who was training at a nearby nursing college. They had got on well, they had wanted to go to bed together, so they had announced their engagement. That, Bill knew, was what a young couple in their situation should do. And their wedding was duly solemnised the autumn after his graduation.

  Though not technically virgins when they married, they might as well have been. Neither had much sexual experience, certainly little with anyone else. And the marriage, like a new plant, bedded down very satisfactorily. At least in Bill’s view.

  But not, apparently, in Andrea’s. Again, he found himself trying to counter disbelief when the fifty-eight-year-old Andrea asserted that their sex life had never been satisfactory. How could two people maintain such different views of something in which they were so intimately involved?

  What she said about children had been a bit of a body-blow too. Bill had assumed, as month by month no signs of pregnancy occurred, that they were just one of those couples who couldn’t have children. The lack gave him the occasional pang, but he wasn’t really that bothered. He’d never been one of those men desperate for the continuity of his genes, and he didn’t actually find children very interesting.

  He had assumed that the lack of offspring might have been more hurtful for Andrea, but she very rarely mentioned the subject. So he, not wishing to stir emotional pain, didn’t either. To Bill there seemed nothing wrong with their childless state. Indeed, it brought many positive benefits. They were better-off, and could enjoy many freedoms denied to their progeny-hampered friends.

  So he received another shock when, in one of Andrea’s parting speeches, she assured him that, for long as it had been necessary throughout their marriage, she had used contraception. She had decided, apparently in the second week of the honeymoon. (What a momentous week that had clearly been for Andrea; how could he have been so completely unaware of what had been going through her mind at the time?) Anyway, she told him that she had decided in the second week of their honeymoon that, though she wanted children, she did not want to have Bill Stratton’s children. Which, when he thought about it, wasn’t very flattering.

  She said a lot else, too – much of which he was happy to let slip into oblivion down the Teflon sides of his brain. Sometimes being shallow had its advantages.

  Andrea had believed in the principle of marriage as much as Bill had. She too subscribed to the ‘should’ theory of human obligations. She didn’t believe that a marriage ought to be abandoned just because it was imperfect. Like everything else, marriage had to be ‘worked at’ and it would get better. This attitude was central to her training as a nurse. In order to do her job, she had to continue in the conviction that her patients would ultimately get better, even though the long-term evidence did not support that view.

  Bill had always been more cynical about such matters, but he didn’t share his opinions with his wife. The world needed people with her attitude, and was a better place with Andrea in it. No point in making her question the foundations of her positive approach.

  Between husband and wife there was, at bottom, an ideological divide. Andrea had always believed the world was improvable. Bill had never really thought that. The world, he knew, was an irredeemable mess, and it was down to the individual – or at least to Bill Stratton – to make the best out of that depressing situation.

  His rationalisation of the differences between them came in the wake of Andrea’s leaving him. That shock prompted a lot of rationalisation. Though Bill Stratton’s nature was not given to introspection, in the stunned weeks after her departure he indulged in more self-analysis than he had in the rest of his lifetime.

  He tried to work out what had gone wrong. More than that, he tried to work out why he hadn’t noticed that anything had gone wrong. There must have been signs of Andrea’s discontent. And yet, if her disillusionment dated from as early in the marriage as she claimed, he had probably interpreted those signs simply as expressions of her personality. Yes, she was grumpy at times. So was he. Everyone was grumpy at times. Yes, she sometimes snapped at him. Ditto.

  Then why had it gone wrong? Soul-searching was an unfamiliar exercise to Bill Stratton, and he found it intriguing as well as painful. He was also suitably modest about his soul-searching potential. The world, he knew, was full of people with souls as deep as the deepest oceans, whose exploration required the services of an emotional bathysphere. He reckoned for searching his own soul a shrimping net would probably be adequate.

  He tried to identify where in the marriage he might have been at fault ... apart from just by being shallow. Shallowness was in his nature – he couldn’t do much about that – but he liked to think he had shown a proper interest in Andrea’s more serious pursuits. He had listened at great length and with apparent attention to bulletins about the fluctuating health of her patients. He had nodded sympathetically and continuously when she and her friends had bewailed the shortcomings of the National Health Service and their line managers.

  He didn’t think he’d imposed his own wishes too forcibly on his wife. Granted, in the early years of their marriage, he had been perhaps a little too assertive in the matter of holidays. His idea of bliss – an uneducated idea, he subsequently came to recognise – was a hotel on a Mediterranean shore with easy access to swimming pools, bars and restaurants. Only after three such holidays had Andrea made clear to him that she didn’t enjoy spending time in ‘tourist traps, which gave an unreal and completely sanitised impression of what the life of the country was really like.’

  To give himself his due, Bill had responded. From then on, he’d allowed Andrea to select their holiday destinations and, in the cause of avoiding ‘tourist traps’, h
ad suffered diarrhoea in most countries of the Third World. He had expressed appropriate interest in herbal remedies, mud baths and rebirthing rituals. As a result, though he’d felt intermittently virtuous, he’d never had much fun on holidays. But he had always thought he was behaving rather well as a husband, letting his own wishes be subservient to those of his wife.

  In fact, he would have said he’d done that in most areas of their marriage. But evidently he hadn’t done so enough to satisfy Andrea. He tried to think what other deficiencies he had as a human being. And he could only really come up with two major ones.

  First, he had never been very pro-active; he rarely made things happen but was always quite happy for them to happen to him.

  And, second, Bill Stratton suffered from that commonest and most debilitating of human failings – the desire to be liked.

  Inevitably, as he trawled the shallows of his soul during this post-break-up period, sex arose, a huge bristling obvious lobster amidst the surrounding transparency of shrimps. Sex, Bill Stratton knew, from reading such unimpeachable authorities as the Daily Mail, was what made and broke marriages.

  Well, he’d thought their sex life had been all right. Maybe more vigorous and frequent in the early years, but that was only to be expected. The attraction seemed to remain, and impotence was rare and usually alcohol-induced. They certainly weren’t one of those couples from the Daily Mail, whose ‘marriage was a sham’ or ‘a marriage only in name’. Even when they reached fifty, Bill and Andrea Stratton still made love a couple of times a week, and it was fine. Absolutely fine. Though if Bill had been asked the next morning whether they had made love or not the night before, he might have had to think about it.

  Granted ... the frequency of intercourse had rather dropped off in their early fifties, but that was due to the menopause. At least, Andrea said it was due to the menopause and, like most men, Bill Stratton was too squeamish to ask for further details.

  Being an only child, he had grown up in a house where his mother was the only woman, and the idea of her discussing the mystery of women’s bodies with him had been unthinkable. The idea of his father discussing the subject with him was even more far-fetched, and the idea of his father discussing such matters with his mother was beyond the scope of conjecture.