by Simon Brett
“Don’t joke, lady. You could be playing with fire.”
This got the harrumph it deserved from Carole, but Jude started on another line of questioning. “The thing about hitmen is that they work to order…” Viggo nodded in acknowledgement of this self-evident rule of the profession. “Contracts are taken out on people, and the hitmen fulfil the contracts. Is that how you work, Chuck?” She made the name sound as phoney as it was.
“I didn’t say I was a hitman.”
“No, but you’d like to be one, wouldn’t you?”
This question threw him. His façade of cool dropped just for a moment as he hissed, “Yes. I could do it. I could do that kind of stuff. I have done that kind of stuff.”
“Have you?” asked Carole contemptuously.
“I…I…” He looked confused for a moment, then rescued himself with an old line. “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you. Like I said, hitmen keep quiet about their work.”
“You said earlier,” Carole went on, “that nobody told you what to do.”
“That’s right.”
“Which, if it’s true, must mean that you’re not a hitman. Hitmen, as we’ve established, do exactly what they’re told.”
He was silent for a moment, trying to work out the logic of that. Jude, who had been fiddling with her mobile phone, joined the attack. “So who would you take orders from? It’d have to be someone you respect, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t take orders from someone you didn’t respect, would you?”
“No,” he said cautiously, still not sure where this was all leading.
“So what kind of a man would you respect?”
“Someone who’s tough. Someone who stands up to people. Someone who wouldn’t give away any secrets even under torture.” As he itemized it, this wish-list, so far from Viggo’s own character, sounded pitiful.
“Someone like this?” As she said the word, Jude thrust her mobile phone towards him. On the screen appeared Zosia’s photograph of the scarred man with the bikers at the Crown and Anchor.
There was no doubt from Viggo’s reaction that he knew who it was. However much he faffed around with subsequent denials, his first instinctive reaction had been the give-away. Eventually, he said, “So what if I do know him? What’s it to you, lady?”
“Some people think that that man started the fight at the Crown and Anchor last Sunday.” Jude wasn’t too sure about the accuracy of what she was saying. She hadn’t actually heard anyone express that opinion, but she thought it might elicit some response from Viggo.
“So what if he did? Fighters fight. That’s what they do.”
“Do you know the name of the man in the photograph?” Carole asked suddenly.
“I don’t do names.”
“Except to change your own from time to time, Viggo.”
That riled him. Carole’s pale blue eyes took the full beam of his black ones. “Chuck,” he said. “I’m Chuck.”
“Then who was Viggo?”
“Someone else.”
Carole was getting sick of his gnomic responses. “So who was the man in the photograph?”
“You won’t get that out of me, even under torture.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re talking to two middle-aged women in Fethering. We don’t do torture.”
“Others do.”
“Yes, maybe.” Carole looked with exasperation towards Jude, who tried another approach.
“The man in the photograph went to Copsedown Hall to see you.”
Viggo didn’t question her assertion. “So?”
“Why did he come and see you?”
The man’s face took on a pugnacious look. “I can have friends, I can’t I?”
“Friends? Heroes, maybe. Is he your hero?”
“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s a man of action. He’s strong.”
“Does that mean you would take orders from him?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you’d only take orders from someone you respected. The way you describe this man who came to see you, he’s someone you’d respect.” Viggo nodded. “So, what orders did he give you?”
The man’s face closed down. “Orders are secret. Information is only given out on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. No operative should know what orders another operative has been given.”
Carole was beginning to wonder how much more of this nonsense they had to listen to, but Jude persevered. “From the way you speak, you sound as if you are also an operative yourself.”
“You may make that observation, lady. I can neither confirm nor deny it.”
“Even under torture?”
He seemed unaware of the ribbing tone in her voice, as he solemnly confirmed, “Even under torture.”
“So you wouldn’t confirm whether you have also received orders from the man in the photograph?”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t.”
“Would you tell us whether the man in the photograph ever came to Copsedown Hall to talk to you?”
He smiled arrogantly. “Some of us don’t need face-to-face contact to get our orders.”
The way he looked at his mobile while he said this prompted Jude’s next question. “You mean you get your orders on the phone?”
That appealed to his self-importance. “Text,” he said. “Text received. Mobile discarded so there’s no record of the message. Operative obeys order. Job done.”
“And what kind of job are you talking about?”
“Any job.”
“A hitman’s job?”
“That, lady, I would never reveal.”
Carole and Jude looked at each other, raised their eyebrows and both mouthed, “Even under torture.”
Viggo – or maybe Chuck – departed soon after. He left the two women feeling confused. Why had he come? He appeared to be threatening them, warning them off. But quite what he was warning them off was difficult to tell through all his posturing and secondhand dialogue.
“Why should he suddenly want to see you?” asked Carole. “Why today?”
Jude spoke slowly as she pieced together a possible motivation. “He saw me at Copsedown Hall yesterday. He saw that I had been talking to Kelly-Marie. Maybe he thinks I’m getting close to the truth of what happened to Ray, and he comes here to warn me off?”
“Do you think he’d work that out on his own initiative?”
There was a firm shake of Jude’s head. “I don’t think he does much on his own initiative. Beneath all that swagger and bravado, Viggo’s is a very weak personality. I reckon he reported my visit to Kelly-Marie to someone else, and that someone else gave him instructions to come and put the frighteners on me.”
“And who is that ‘someone else’? The scarred man?”
“We don’t seem to have many other candidates for the role.”
In spite of the heat, a shiver ran through Jude. Inept though he had been, Viggo’s visit had got her rattled. Both she and Carole were left with the uneasy sense that under certain circumstances the man could be dangerous.
∨ The Poisoning in the Pub ∧
Twenty-Seven
The first surprise about the Midshipman Inn was how smart it was. The references in Dan Poke’s act had suggested a very rough pub in a very rough area, but the exterior was neat and recently decorated. Decorated in exactly the same style as the Weldisham Hare and Hounds.
The same mulberry colour predominated, with the doors and window frames in pigeon-feather grey. The inn sign showed no representation of a young naval officer; instead the pub’s name was written in neat grey calligraphy on a mulberry-coloured board. And the name on the sign had actually been shortened to ‘the Middy’. The image was much more gastropub than old boozer.
The area where the building stood was also less rundown than Carole and Jude had expected from Dan Poke’s jokes. Small Victorian cottages showed recent signs of renovation. Though a few they passed from where they parked the car were still shabby and sported the boards of bell-pushes that signified multiple occu
pancy, some had been turned into brightly coloured designer homes. Because it was a Sunday there were no workmen visible, but loaded skips in the road showed that local improvement was an ongoing process.
And in the middle of all this gentrification the Middy had a perfect location.
Stepping into the pub, Carole and Jude felt the welcome blast of air conditioning, icy after the July heat. The interior of the Middy maintained the mulberry-and-grey theme, though the floor, tables and chairs were solid chunky pine. So was the one long bar. Despite the pub’s proximity to Fratton Park, home of Portsmouth Football Club, there were no big plasma screens for Sky Sports. On blackboards menu choices were displayed in italic chalk writing. Painted boards listed The Middy’s theme nights, Monday, Curry Club. Tuesday, Quiz Night. Wednesday, Two-For-One Steak Special. Thursday, Comedy Club. Friday and Saturday, Live Music. Sunday nights appeared to have no theme. Nor from a quick look around the various bays separated by pine uprights, did they appear to have many customers.
As in the Hare and Hounds, the bar staff wore mulberry shirts with the grey logo of the pub’s name across the breast pockets. At the bar Jude picked up a wine list, turned it over and pointed out to Carole a logo and a name.
“Look,” she said, “Home Hostelries. We should have remembered. The Hare and Hounds at Weld-isham was a Home Hostelries pub back when Will Maples used to run it.”
“Yes, of course.”
Jude turned the list the right way round and, from the surprisingly good selection of white wines, ordered two large Maipo Valley Chardonnays. Exactly what they’d had in Weldisham. In every detail, Home Hostelries pubs were clones of each other.
When Jude turned back to Carole with the drinks, her friend was making little nodding gestures over to a dark corner of the pub.
Where sat the man with a scarred face and missing fingers whom they had last seen fighting outside the front of the Crown and Anchor.
This was easier than they had dared hope, but the situation also presented difficulties. They were guilty of the same lack of planning as Viggo had demonstrated the day before. The logic of coming to the Middy had seemed obvious to both of them, but neither had given any thought to what they should do when they found their quarry. For Carole the scenario was particularly perplexing. She didn’t think she was very good with new people even when she’d been introduced to them. And the thought of just walking up to a man of whose propensity to violence she had been a witness was very alien.
Characteristically, Jude did not suffer from such hang-ups. Nodding for Carole to follow her, she walked straight towards the alcove where the scarred man was sitting. He looked up at her with some puzzlement, but like most men approached by Jude, didn’t object to what he was seeing.
“I think we’ve met before,” Jude announced, taking possession of a chair opposite him. Carole scuttled awkwardly to an adjacent one.
“Oh yeah?” The man looked fuddled. The pint whose remains he was spinning out was clearly not his first of the day.
Jude gestured towards it. “Get you another of those?”
He nodded. “Stella.”
Carole looked at her friend in desperation. Don’t leave me alone with him, the pale blue eyes pleaded. But by then Jude was back at the bar.
Carole cleared her throat, trying to think of an appropriate pleasantry for the occasion, but couldn’t come up with anything. The only sentence that came into her mind was: “That was a very good fight you got involved in at the Crown and Anchor last week.” But she didn’t think that would have been right.
Still, her silence didn’t seem to bother the man. His eyes remained fixed somewhere in the middle distance. Perhaps he didn’t care who approached him, so long as they bought him a pint of Stella.
Jude handed over what he required and the man thanked her, though without taking much notice of the supplier. His interest in her as an attractive woman had been eclipsed by the more urgent priority of a drink in his hand. He took a long swallow.
Jude continued her frontal approach. “We saw you at the Crown and Anchor in Fethering, a week ago today, when that fight broke out.”
He wasn’t as drunk as he had appeared to be. A light of caution came into his eye as he put his pint down on the table. “So?”
“That was the night a man called Ray got stabbed.”
He nodded. “I heard about it. That kind of thing happens when people get into fights.”
“Do you like getting into fights?” asked Jude with a directness that Carole wouldn’t have been capable of.
He smiled. The scarring on his face meant that only one side of his face turned up. He had the original stiff upper lip. It was also spookily like the smile they had seen from Viggo when he came to Woodside Cottage. “Fights?” the man echoed. “Getting into fights outside a pub? That’s not fighting, not if you’ve done the real thing.”
“By doing ‘the real thing’, do you mean that you’ve been in the army?”
He nodded in appreciation of her logic. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“And is that where you got the injuries?”
He nodded, his hand instinctively going up to the scarred side of his face. “Patrol outside Basra. Roadside bomb. Killed the driver. I got this. Driver was my mucker.”
“I’m sorry.”
The hazel eyes he turned on Jude now didn’t look drunk at all. “Yes, everyone’s sorry. Nobody can do anything about it, though. I was going to train as a chippy when I got out.” He waived the maimed hand from which two and a half fingers were missing. “Not going to be much use with that, am I?”
“But presumably you had good hospital treatment for your injuries?” said Carole.
“Oh, yes. They patched me up all right. I even got some compensation. Not much, though. It doesn’t go far.”
“And you still get benefits, don’t you?”
“Yeah. They’re not much, either. My dad was in the army. Signals.”
“During the Second World War?”
He nodded. “Served out in Egypt. And he came back here and he was treated like a bloody hero. He’d done his bit to save us all from Adolf Shickelgruber. And I come back, and I’ve done my bit to save us all from Saddam Hussein…and does anyone give a shit? No, even here in Portsmouth, where you’d have thought they knew something about the armed forces, I’m treated like some kind of pariah. Oh yes, people say, sure you had a rough time, but the war you were fighting was one we shouldn’t have got involved in in the first place. Illegal war. Turned Iraq into a bigger bloody mess than it was before we went in. Let me tell you, there’s not a lot of sympathy for an Iraq veteran. They want to forget about us, bloody government does too. We’re what’s left, we’re the mess. They want to sweep us under the carpet.”
“Do you live round here?” asked Carole.
He flicked his head back, gesturing in the direction of a shabby sixties tower block they’d noticed as they arrived. “Flat up there.”
“Sorry, we don’t know your name.” said Jude.
“No, you don’t.” He seemed quite happy to let that status quo continue.
“I’m Jude, this is Carole.”
“Carole Seddon,” said her friend, who liked to have the niceties maintained.
He still didn’t seem inclined to give them his name, so Jude persisted, “I knew Ray, the man who died.”
“Oh yes?”
“And we’ve both met Viggo.”
A reaction flicked in his hazel eyes, then he seemed to make a decision and announced, “My name’s Derren Hart.”
“And you know Viggo, don’t you?” For a moment he contemplated denying it. “Or should I call him ‘Chuck’?” Jude went on.
“I’ve met him, yes,” Derren conceded.
“He seems to regard you as a hero,” said Carole tartly, “even if nobody else does.”
“Viggo’s got problems.”
“Apparently he once tried to join the army,” said Jude.
“He told me that. The army may be ha
rd up for recruits, but they still aren’t going to take on someone like him.” The man let out a bark of laughter. “He’s a few bricks short of a load.”
“So was Ray.”
“Yes. You know, I’ve met people who reckon anyone who goes into the forces must have mental problems. You join up with something where you’re trained to obey orders without question. Some people reckon only a lame-brain would do that.”
“And what do you reckon?”
Derren Hart turned his hazel eyes on Carole, and there was a new, appraising look in them. Either he’d never been as drunk as he was pretending to be, or else he had sobered up very quickly. “I reckon…” he said slowly, “that in certain situations – crisis situations, battle situations – making people obey orders without question is the only way of getting things done. If someone stops to make a moral judgement, it’s already too late. They’ll have been blown away before they’ve made their decision.”
“And would you still believe in obeying orders without question?” asked Jude.
“It would depend who the orders came from.”
“Like Viggo said, the orders would have to come from someone you respected?”
“Maybe. There might be other reasons why you’d obey someone.”
“The amount of money they were paying you?” suggested Carole.
He didn’t like that. The look of concentrated malevolence he turned on her made Carole certain that she’d touched a nerve. Derren Hart was in the pay of someone. Maybe he’d been paid to bring the bikers to the Crown and Anchor? And to start the fight there? If so, who was his paymaster?
“Look, why are you asking me these questions? What’s your interest in all this?”
“Oh,” Jude replied with arch fluffiness, “we’re just two little old ladies from Fethering. There’s been a murder on our doorstep and we’re doing our amateur sleuthing best to find out whodunnit.”
In spite of himself, the half-smile again flickered across his face. “Is that what you’re doing? How sweet and charming. But has it possibly occurred to you that you’re asking for trouble? A lot of murders happen because someone has been too curious and they present less of a risk dead.”