by Brett, Simon
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Hanging in the Hotel
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2004 by Simon Brett
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0475-7
A BERKLEY BOOK®
Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: August, 2005
Also by Simon Brett
A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM
DEAD ROMANTIC
SINGLED OUT
Fethering Mysteries
THE BODY ON THE BEACH
DEATH ON THE DOWNS
THE TORSO IN THE TOWN
MURDER IN THE MUSEUM
Mrs. Pargeter Novels
A NICE CLASS OF CORPSE
MRS. PRESUMED DEAD
MRS. PARGETER’S PACKAGE
MRS. PARGETER’S POUND OF FLESH
MRS. PARGETER’S PLOT
MRS. PARGETER’S POINT OF HONOUR
Short Stories
A BOX OF TRICKS
CRIME WRITERS AND OTHER ANIMALS
Charles Paris Novels
CAST, IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE
SO MUCH BLOOD
STAR TRAP
AN AMATEUR CORPSE
A COMEDIAN DIES
THE DEAD SIDE OF THE MIKE
SITUATION TRAGEDY
MURDER UNPROMPTED
MURDER IN THE TITLE
NOT DEAD, ONLY RESTING
DEAD GIVEAWAY
WHAT BLOODY MAN IS THAT?
A SERIES OF MURDERS
CORPORATE BODIES
A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE
SICKEN AND SO DIE
DEAD ROOM FARCE
To Sophie and Jeremy, with lots of love
1
AS THE TAXI entered the gates, Jude looked up at Hopwicke Country House Hotel, a monument to nostalgic pampering. The mansion had been built in the early eighteenth century by George Hopwicke, a young baronet who had increased his considerable inheritance by “the successes of his plantations in the West Indies” or, in other words, by his profits from the slave trade. The main building was a perfectly proportioned cube, the ideal echoed in so many late twentieth-century developments of “exclusive Georgian townhouses.” The elegantly tall windows on three floors at the front of the house looked down from the fringes of the South Downs, across the bungalow- and greenhouse-littered plain around Worthing, to the gunmetal glimmer of the English Channel.
Stabling and utility buildings were behind the house, neatly shielded by tall hedges. The hundreds of acres in which George Hopwicke had built this testament to his taste and opulence had been sold off piecemeal for development over the centuries, and at the beginning of the twenty-first only a four-acre buffer protected the upper-class elegance of the hotel from the encroachments of the ever-expanding English middle classes. And also from the encroachments of the present. Even the brochure read, “Leave the twenty-first century behind when you step through our elegant portals.”
It’s remarkable, Jude thought as the taxi nosed up the drive, how much nostalgia in England is for things that never existed. To escape the present, the English like nothing better than to immerse themselves in an idealised past. She felt sure that the people of other nations—or other nations whose peoples could afford the luxury of self-examination—also venerated the past, but not in the same way. Only in England would the rosy tints of retrospection be seen through the lens of social class.
The taxi crunched to a halt at the farthest point of the gravel arc, which went on round to rejoin the road at a second set of tall metal gates. The semicircle of grass that the drive framed was laid out as a croquet lawn.
Jude paid the driver, without calculating how large a chunk that would take out of her evening’s earnings, and hurried through the classical portico into Hopwicke Country House Hotel.
New visitors were intended to notice the artfully artless displays of impedimenta that tidily littered the hallway, but Jude had seen them all before. So she didn’t pause to take in the coffin-like croquet box with spilling mallets∆, the randomly propped fishing rods, brown-gutted tennis racquets in wooden presses, splitting cricket bats and crumpled leather riding boots. Nor did she linger to scan the walls for their hunting prints, mounted antlers, stuffed trout or ancient photographs of dead-looking tweedy men surveying carpets of dead birds.
But everything in the displays of which Jude took no notice supported her theory about English nostalgia. Hopwicke Country House Hotel aspired to an image of leisured indolence, set in comforting aspic somewhere between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a world of field sports and tennis parties, of dainty teas on shaven lawns, large slugs of brandy and soda before many-coursed dinners. It was a world in which nobody was so indelicate as to think about money, and in which all the boring stuff was done by invisible servants. It was a world that never existed.
But, though the guests of Hopwicke Country House Hotel were probably deep in their hearts aware of this fact, like children suspending disbelief to their own advantage over the existence of Father Christmas, they willingly ignored it. None of the clientele, anyway, had the background which might qualify them to argue with the detail of the Hopwicke Country House Hotel ambiance. Real aristocrats, whose upbringing might have contained some elements of the effect being sought after, would never have dreamed of staying in a place like that. American tourists, whose images of England derived largely from works featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, found nothing at all discordant. And, though the trust-funded or City bonus-rich young couples who made up the rest of the hotel’s guest list might occasionally assert themselves by sending the wine back, they were far too socially insecure to question the authenticity of the overall experience for which they paid so much over the odds. When they departed the hotel, they didn’t blench
as they flashed a precious metal card over the bill. In that detail the image was sustained; no one was so indelicate as to appear to think about money.
As to all the boring stuff being done by invisible servants, here Hopwicke Country House Hotel was on less certain ground. Though that was certainly the effect to which the management aspired, they didn’t have at their disposal the vast armies of staff which would have ensured the clockwork precision running of an Edwardian country house. Economy dictated that there were never really enough bodies around to do everything that was required, that the hotel’s owner ended up doing far more menial work than she should have done and that, when one member of staff failed to turn up on time, chaos threatened.
Which was why Jude had received an emergency call from the hotel that April afternoon. There was no one at the antique reception table as she hurried past, just a tiny brass bell to summon service. Jude was making for the kitchen at the end of the hall, but noticed that a door opposite the bar entrance was open, and moved toward it.
Steep steps led down to the hotel’s cellar. The lights were on. As Jude peered down, a familiar face looked up at her.
“Thank God you’ve come!”
“What is it this time?”
“Bloody waitresses! Stella’s cried off because she’s going out with some new man, but she promised me her daughter’d come in. Bloody kid rang in at quarter to four to say she can’t do it.”
“Any reason?”
“Didn’t say. Told me and rang off.”
“Suppose you should be grateful she rang at all.”
“Why? God, Stella’s going to get an earful when she next comes in!”
“Don’t sack her.” Jude’s voice was firm and cautionary. “You can’t afford to lose any more staff.”
“No.” The hotel owner sighed, and held out two bottles of port. “Could you take these?”
Then she picked up two more, turned off the cellar light, came up the stairs and locked the door behind her. “Going to need a lot of port tonight,” she said, and led the way through to the kitchen. Inside, she put the bottles down on the table and wearily coiled her long body into a chair.
Even though she had thickened out around the neck, Suzy Longthorne remained a beautiful woman. It was still easy to see why she had graced so many magazine covers, been a desirable trophy for so many photographers and pop singers, been so frequently pursued and so frequently won. The famous hair, which had been through every latest style for nearly four decades, almost certainly now needed help to maintain its natural auburn, but looked good. The hazel eyes, though surrounded by a tracery of tiny lines, were still commanding. And the lithe, full-breasted figure seemed to have made no concessions to the years, though less of its toning now came from the gym as from the extraordinary effort of running Hopwicke Country House Hotel.
She was incapable of dressing badly. Other women in the same pale grey T-shirt, jeans and brown leather slip-on shoes would have looked ordinary, sloppy even. Suzy Longthorne could still have stepped straight on to a catwalk. Even the blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron looked like a fashion accessory on her.
In fact, a perfect photo shoot could have been done at that moment. The chatelaine of Hopwicke House in her kitchen. Like the rest of the hotel, the room had been restored by expensive designers to a high specification. Without losing its eighteenth-century proportions or its wide fireplace, the kitchen had been equipped with the latest culinary devices. Hidden lighting twinkled knowingly on surfaces of stainless steel and the copper bottoms of serried utensils.
The two women had known each other since their late teens, when both had been picked up as a potential Faces of the Sixties. But Jude’s modelling career had stuttered to a quick end. Though she didn’t lack for offers of work (amongst other things), a couple of long photo shoots and one catwalk show had brought home to her the incredible tedium of the job, and she had moved sideways into acting in the blossoming world of fringe theatre.
But Jude’s relationship with Suzy had endured. Not on a regular basis—frequently years would elapse between contacts—but it was always there. Usually, Suzy was the one who contacted Jude, at the end of another of her high-profile relationships. And the tear-stained famous face would be buried into Jude’s increasingly ample shoulder, while the perfidies of men were once again catalogued and bold unrealisable ambitions for a relationship-free life were once again outlined.
Suzy never seemed aware of what others had observed in their encounters with Jude—that they were the confiders, she the confidant. Jude rarely gave away much information about herself and, though her own emotional life had been at least as varied, if not as public, as Suzy’s, little of it was aired. There were friends to whom Jude did turn in moments of her own distress, but Suzy Longthorne was not one of them.
Yet the relationship wasn’t one-sided. Suzy mattered to Jude. There was a core of honesty in the woman that appealed, together with a strong work ethic. And Jude was endlessly fascinated by the problems that accompanied the fulfilment of many women’s dream: that of being born incredibly beautiful.
Suzy Longthorne had bought Hopwicke Country House Hotel with the proceeds from the breakdown of her longest marriage. For thirteen years she had stayed with Rick Hendry, as he metamorphosed from ageing rocker to pop entrepreneur and television producer, and as his tastes shifted from the maturity of his wife to the pubescent charms of wannabe pop stars. Rick had made his name with a band called Zedrach-Kona, which produced supposedly profound sci-fi-influenced concept albums in the late seventies. The success of these, including the massive seller The Columns of Korfilia, had made him rich and famous for a year or two, then rich and forgotten. But in his fifties Rick Hendry had found a new incarnation as an acerbic critic on Pop Crop, a television talent show which pitted the talents of manufactured boy bands and girl bands against each other. His own company, Korfilia Productions, made the show, and so once again for Rick Hendry the money was rolling in.
By that time, being back in the public spotlight meant that his ego no longer needed the support of marriage. The divorce settlement had been generous and Suzy had invested it all into Hopwicke House.
The venture started well. The conversion of the space from private dwelling to hotel had been expensively and expertly completed. The recollected glamour of its new owner gave the venue an air of chic. Well-heeled names from her much-publicised past booked in. Journalists who’d cut their cub-reporting teeth on interviews with Suzy Longthorne commissioned features for the newspapers and magazines they now edited. For a place that marketed itself as a discreet and quiet retreat, Hopwicke Country House Hotel got a lot of media coverage.
Suzy was by no means a remote figurehead for the enterprise. She was a very hands-on manager. Her money was backing the project, and Suzy Longthorne had always kept an eye on what her money was up to. She was punctilious about the quality of staff—particularly the chefs—who worked for her. The media may have started the ball rolling, but word-of-mouth recommendations ensured its continuing motion.
As the reputation of Hopwicke House grew, the hotel appeared increasingly in brochures targeted at the international super-rich—particularly the Americans. Soon the breakfast tables in the conservatory resounded to Californian enquiries as to what a kipper might be, or tentative Texan queries about the provenance of black pudding. The hotel was included in an increasing number of upmarket tours, and played its part in nurturing the delusion of wealthy Americans that England had been created by P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie.
So Suzy Longthorne had cleverly carved her niche, done the appropriate niche-marketing and looked set fair to reap great riches from that niche.
Until 11 September 2001. Amongst the many other effects of that momentous day, as Americans ceased to fly abroad and the bottom fell out of the tourism market, bookings at Hopwicke Country House Hotel immediately declined. And the transatlantic market was not alone in drying up. A collective guilt about overindulgence had struck the Weste
rn world, and no amount of inducements in the form of “Weekend Breaks” with suicidally low profit margins seemed able to reverse the downturn for Suzy Longthorne’s business.
She had been forced to abandon the exclusivity that had been her cachet and selling point, and accept bookings from anyone who wished to book. It was with this knowledge that, that April afternoon, her friend Jude asked, a little tentatively, “Who have you got in tonight?”
Suzy’s perfect nose wrinkled with distaste. “The Pillars of Sussex.”
“Oh.” Jude grimaced in sympathy. Though she had never met any members, she recognised the name. Like most British clubs and institutions, it had been founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Originally under the grand name of “The Pillars of Society,” the group had been initiated for philanthropic purposes, and was still involved in local charity work and Christmas fund-raising. As with many such associations, however, the initial worthy intention soon took a backseat to procedures, rituals, ceremonies, elections, all of which had the same general aim: that those who had achieved membership of the Pillars should feel eternally superior to those who had not. Nothing had changed since an 1836 publication, Hints on Etiquette, observed that, “the English are the most aristocratic democrats in the world; always endeavouring to squeeze through the portals of rank and fashion, and then slamming the door in the face of any unfortunate devil who may happen to be behind them.”