The Fethering Mysteries 10; The Poisoning in the Pub tfm-10

by Simon Brett

  This good news, however, was counterbalanced the following day, when the Fethering Observer was published. The main headline read: CROWN AND ANCHOR SHUT DOWN IN POISONED SCALLOPS SCARE. The ensuing article contained all the righteous indignation of a local cub reporter with delusions of being a crusading journalist. It concluded: “Following complaints from customers, the Crown and Anchor will be closed until further notice.”

  Carole had picked up a Fethering Observer from the local newsagent on her way back from Gulliver’s morning walk on the beach. (She did not believe in the indulgence of having papers delivered.) The headline couldn’t be missed; a paraphrase of it also appeared on the felt-tipped display boards for the Fethering Observer all around the town.

  After she had towelled off Gulliver’s sandy paws and made herself a cup of coffee, she sat down at the kitchen table and read the whole item. It was another scorching day. The door to the garden was open, but the air didn’t seem to move at all.

  Once she’d finished reading Carole phoned next door, but there was no reply from Woodside Cottage. Then she remembered that Jude had said something about going off to ‘a day’s conference on alternative therapies in Brighton on Thursday’. Probably the reason why Carole had forgotten that was the instinct her brain had to switch off whenever she heard the words ‘alternative therapy’.

  She was surprised at how much the Fethering Observer report had upset her. In spite of the ‘serve him right’ attitude she had expressed earlier in the week, she felt terribly sorry for Ted Crisp. Though their brief affair had ended long before, she didn’t like to think of him suffering. So she rang through to the Crown and Anchor to commiserate.

  The landlord was in a predictable state of fury. “I get the all-clear from Health and Safety yesterday. They say I can open up today, and then what bloody happens? The Fethering Observer only tells everyone from here to Fedborough that the Crown and Anchor’s ‘closed until further notice’! I think I can be excused for feeling paranoid. It’s not my imagination. Everybody bloody is picking on me!”

  “I’m sure it’ll soon blow over,” said Carole. Though, knowing how the gossip machine of Fethering worked, she rather doubted the accuracy of her prediction.

  “Well, I’ve had it up to here.” Ted groaned. “Anyway, how was the Fethering Observer onto it so quickly? Somebody must’ve snitched to them. Somebody round here’s trying to do a number on me.”

  He certainly did sound paranoid, but Carole couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for him.

  “And now I don’t know whether I should be pulling the plugs on this Dan Poke gig on Sunday.”

  “Have you sold many tickets?”

  “Yes, a bundle. And news about it is up on Dan’s website. He reckons we’ll get a lot more on the door. There’s even an interview with him in the Fethering Observer entertainment section. Plugging the gig in the same paper that says the Crown and Anchor’s closed ‘till further notice’. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left hand’s doing. I don’t know – should I call Dan? I mean, if people think the pub’s closed…He’s doing me a favour. Doing the gig for just expenses. But then say I can’t get an audience for him…”

  “If people have bought tickets,” Carole reasoned, “they’ll come. Or they’ll at least ring you to check whether the pub will be open on Sunday.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, it makes me bloody want to spit…” He took a deep breath. “Anyway, look,” he went on, controlling his anger and trying to speak in a more conciliatory tone, “what I’d like to do is invite you and Jude down here for lunch today. On the house. By way of compensation for what happened on Monday. What do you say?”

  “Well,” Carole replied cautiously, “Jude’s away for the day at some conference.”

  “Then you just come on your own. I want to have someone in the bloody bar at lunchtime. With the publicity I’ve been getting recently, you’re likely to be the only one.”

  ♦

  It wasn’t quite that bad, but lunchtime business at the Crown and Anchor was very slow. The contrast with the bustling energy of three days before could not have been more marked. There was a Dutch family of four sitting outside, presumably tourists unaware of any adverse publicity. At the bar lounged a couple of the regular lunchtime drinkers, returning for reasons of habit and geographical convenience. And there was Carole.

  The menu offered a couple of seafood dishes, but she steered clear of them and, as her compensatory lunch, ordered sausage and mash. She determined that, since she was going to have such a substantial midday meal, she wouldn’t eat anything that evening. And she restricted herself to one small glass of Chilean Chardonnay.

  The advantage of the slackness of business was that Carole did get a chance to talk to Ted Crisp. He looked more haggard than she had ever seen him. Above the beard line his cheeks were hollow and his eyes were sunk into dark circles. Leaving Zosia in charge behind the bar (not that she had any customers to deal with), he came to sit at Carole’s table. He nursed a glass of mineral water. The fringes of his hair were spiked from earlier sweating.

  She felt she wanted to reach out to hug him, to make it all better. That’s what Jude would have done. But of course, being Carole Seddon and not Jude, Carole didn’t.

  “Irade’ll pick up,” she said.

  “Huh.”

  “At least you’ve got a clean bill of health from the Health and Safety.”

  “Yes, but it’s still going to take a while to get the punters back. And this is the time of year I should be coining it.”

  Ed Pollack had come out into the bar. Even without much cooking to do, the kitchen was an uncomfortably hot place to be on that kind of day. A tall, thin boy, he looked younger than his twenty-five years. He was wearing stylish glasses, those very thin ones with dark frames that make people look like aliens from cheap sci-fi movies. Dressed in rubber clogs, black and white checked trousers, a white button-across top and a tight black cap, he was just untying a white scarf from around his neck to mop his brow. In his hands he held a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. Clearly about to go out to the car park for one of his fag breaks.

  But when he saw Carole, the boy changed his destination. Crossing to the table, he offered his sincere apologies for the effect his scallops had had on her. Ed Pollack had a surprisingly upper-class accent for Carole’s preconception of how a chef should talk. “I feel terrible about it. Worst nightmare you can have in my profession.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Carole, unwilling to increase Ted Crisp’s self-recrimination. “These things happen, Ed.”

  “Yes, but I pride myself on the way I keep my kitchen. Come and have a look.”

  Carole looked across at Ted Crisp, who shrugged permission. If that’s what the boy wanted to do to make himself feel better, then fine. So Carole was given a quick tour of the kitchen. Every surface was, spotless. There was no trace of black on the hobs or grills. The white-handled knives and other utensils gleamed, as did the magnetic strip to which they were attached. Ed Pollack even opened the fridges for his visitor. He turned and appealed to her. “All perfectly clean, isn’t it?”

  “Better than most hospital intensive care units,” said Carole, in an attempt to lift the woebegone expression from his face. She led the way back into the bar and, showing more social grace than she could usually command, asked, “Can I get you a drink, Ed, to show there are no hard feelings?”

  “On the house,” said Ted. “Coke, isn’t it?”

  “Please,” said the boy as he sat down languidly at their table. “God, I’m drinking so much at the moment. Not booze, just water and stuff. I seem to have a permanent thirst.”

  “An occupational hazard, I would imagine,” said Carole. “Spending all your time in a hot kitchen.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was a silence, as she tried to think what to ask next. Carole realized that she was being given a perfect opportunity to continue her investigation into the poisoning at the Crown and Anchor.
She owed it to Jude not to mess up the chance. Besides, she relished the idea of taking her neighbour back some new titbit of carefully elicited knowledge.

  “I suppose, Ed, you have no more idea than Ted what might have caused the dodgy scallops to get through?”

  The chef shook his head. “I just can’t see how it happened. And obviously I’m furious, because it’s a black mark against my professionalism. I mean, one thing they din into you at catering college: you always have to be careful with shellfish, particularly in weather like this. So I’ve been double-checking everything.”

  “How long would chilled scallops last normally?”

  “Couple of days tops. If you’ve had them any longer than that, even in the fridge, you should chuck them. Which is what I always do. But that lot on Monday came in fresh from the suppliers. I signed for the delivery myself, put them straight in the marinade and into the fridge. Before I did that, I cleared out some that’d been delivered on Saturday. Now if it had been that lot the customers had been served with, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised at what happened.”

  Ted Crisp joined them silently at the table and slid a glass of Coca-Cola across to the chef, as Carole asked, “If the new scallops had been substituted by old ones, would you be able to tell?”

  “I certainly would before they were in the marinade. They’d smell ‘off’. Once they’d been marinaded, I’m not so sure. Soy sauce can be pretty pungent, it might mask the bad smell. So I suppose under those circumstances it would be possible to make a mistake.”

  “Except,” Ted asserted peevishly, “that couldn’t be what happened on Monday, because you took the fresh delivery yourself.”

  “I was just asking hypothetically,” said Carole. “I mean, in the event that someone had actually switched the tray of fresh scallops in the fridge for a tray of past-their-sell-by ones, it would have been possible that you’d have cooked them, Ed, without noticing anything was wrong?”

  “It is just possible, yes.”

  “But it could never have happened,” Ted repeated.

  “As I say, I’m just working out possible scenarios. And, Ed, you didn’t leave the kitchen for any length of time on Monday morning after the scallops had been delivered?”

  “I nipped out for the odd fag. Just as I’m going to do now.”

  He looked down at his cigarette packet, as if about to leave for the car park, but Carole pressed on, “But there wasn’t a longer time when you left the kitchen unattended?”

  “Zosia and I were in and out, anyway,” said led, and continued as if he wanted to forestall any further argument, “The kitchen wasn’t left unattended for any length of time after the scallops had been delivered.”

  Carole caught the quick look exchanged between Ed Pollack and Zosia at the bar. There was something that hadn’t been told. She wondered how she was going to be able to winkle it out, but fortunately the chef saved her the trouble.

  “Ted, we might as well tell her.”

  The landlord looked truculent. “I don’t see any reason why we need to.”

  “Well, I need to. As a professional chef, I want some explanation for what might have happened.”

  Ted Crisp looked away towards the bar, as if hoping for support. But Zosia’s expression of defiance showed that he wasn’t going to get any from her. “All right,” he mumbled.

  Ed Pollack took up his cue. “There was another delivery on Monday morning. Beer. The delivery man sends the barrels down to the cellar from a chute outside. On Monday a couple of the barrels rolled on the floor and got jammed against a table down there. Ted couldn’t shift them, so he asked Zosia and me to give him a hand.”

  “We weren’t down there that long,” the landlord argued.

  “Twenty minutes at least,” said Ed implacably. “I know, because I’d had time to put the scallops in their marinade before we started, and when we finished there was still time for me to have a fag in the car park before we opened up at eleven.”

  “So the kitchen was unattended for twenty minutes?” Receiving a nod from the chef, Carole turned the full beam of her pale blue eyes onto Ted Crisp. “Did you tell that to the Health and Safety inspectors?”

  He shook his shaggy head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Zosia’s voice from the bar. The regulars had left; she had no anxiety about speaking out loud. “You do it because you don’t want there to be any trouble for Ray. That’s why you don’t tell the inspectors he was here Monday morning.”

  Carole’s pale blue eyes focused back on the wretched landlord. “Is that true, Ted?”

  He sighed. “Look, poor bloke, he hasn’t exactly been dealt the best hand in life, has he? Ray never made it at school, he’s never been able to hold down a proper job. Everywhere he’s gone, people’ve made fun of him, all because of a disability he was born with. Made fun of him or bullied him. It’s not his fault he’s like he is. And there’s no way he could have done anything to the scallops, anyway.”

  “If that’s so, why didn’t you tell the Health and Safety people he could have been in the kitchen?”

  “Because they’d have given him hassle, and he can’t stand it when people try to get at him. I wanted to spare him that.”

  “But you also want to keep your business going, and lying to the Health and Safety inspectors is not the best way of – ”

  “Listen, Carole!” said Ted, suddenly angry. “Ray trusts me, and I pay him for doing odd jobs.”

  “Which is, I’m sure, very charitable of you, but when your livelihood – ”

  “I said ‘Listen!’ If I tell the Health and Safety people about him, they’re going to ask questions about his terms of employment here. They’re going to ask about contracts, minimum wage, whether he’s registered with the tax authorities, all kinds of stuff. Then they’ll no doubt report their findings to some other bloody bureaucrats and a directive will come down from on high to say that I can’t continue to use Ray’s services. And the poor bugger will lose the one thing that gives him any sense of self-esteem – not to mention a little bit of pocket money – and I’ll feel even more bloody useless than I usually do!”

  Even during their brief relationship, Carole had never heard such an impassioned speech from Ted Crisp. There was a shocked silence after he’d finished. Then she said, “Look, that’s very admirable, led, but you must see that it’s going against your own interests. You’ve been in trouble with the Health and Safety authorities. Lying to them can only get you into more trouble with them.”

  “That would only be true, Carole, if there was any chance Ray had had any hand in what happened. He couldn’t have. He has the mental age of…I don’t know…a five-year-old, maybe. He certainly hasn’t got the intellectual capacity to plot the poisoning of my customers.”

  “But he could have made a mistake…put the old scallops in the fridge in place of the others.”

  “That, Carole, would assume that there were any old scallops around.”

  She turned gleefully to Ed Pollack. “You said you’d just cleared out the old scallops from the weekend.”

  “Yes, but I put them in a plastic bag which I sealed before putting it in the bin. And the bag was still sealed when the Health and Safety people checked it out yesterday.”

  “Ah.” Carole was crestfallen to have her moment of triumph taken away. “So we’re still no nearer finding an explanation for what happened on Monday.”

  “No,” agreed Ted, with something like finality.

  “I don’t suppose…” said Carole tentatively, “that you’d tell me Ray’s address?”

  “You don’t suppose correctly.”

  “But I would like to talk to him about – ”

  Ted Crisp was about to bawl her out again, but was distracted by the opening of the pub door and the entrance of a sharp-featured woman in a skimpy red top and white jeans.

  “Oh God,” he groaned. “More trouble. Talk about hitting a man when he�
��s down.”

  ∨ The Poisoning in the Pub ∧

  Six

  Introductions were made. The woman, as Carole rather suspected she might be, was identified as Ted Crisp’s ex-wife, Sylvia. Her presence made him look more hangdog than ever. For Carole it was a novel sensation. Being in the same room as an ex-lover and another woman he’d slept with was not something that had happened to her before, neither in her private or professional life. Though such situations were probably very common in the Home Office, it hadn’t been a part of her experience there. She couldn’t deny, though, that, amidst her mixed emotions, there was a certain amount of excitement at the idea.

  Also a natural feminine interest in what the woman looked like. Early forties probably, thin, but with the beginnings of a roll of fat at her midriff. Brown hair a bit too chestnutty to be entirely natural, worn swept off her face and shoulder length, fixed rigid with spray. A sharp nose, wide thin-lipped mouth over prominent front teeth. Hazel eyes, attractive but without depth, like an animal’s.

  But Ted’s ex-wife was undeniably sexy. One of those women who made Carole Seddon feel very conscious of her own dowdiness.

  Ed Pollack and Zosia had perhaps encountered Sylvia before. They both certainly took their first opportunity to melt back into the kitchen. And, despite the pleading look in Ted’s eyes, Carole too soon made her excuses and left. In the stifling heat of the July afternoon, there was a feeling of a storm about to break.

  – Just as she was approaching the door, Carole said, “Oh, I haven’t settled up, have I, Ted?”

  “You’re forgetting. Nothing to pay. I said today was on the house.”

  As she went out of the pub Carole heard Sylvia’s hard nasal voice behind her saying, “That’s no way to run a business. No wonder you say you haven’t got any money. Do you pick up the tab for all your lady friends, Ted?”