Best Served Cold

by Sally Spencer

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  The Inspector Sam Blackstone Series

  BLACKSTONE AND THE NEW WORLD

  BLACKSTONE AND THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

  BLACKSTONE AND THE GREAT WAR

  BLACKSTONE AND THE ENDGAME

  The Inspector Woodend Mysteries

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

  THE RING OF DEATH

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  DEATH’S DARK SHADOW

  SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL

  BEST SERVED COLD

  BEST SERVED COLD

  A Monika Paniatowski Mystery

  Sally Spencer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2015 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Alan Rustage.

  The right of Alan Rustage to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Spencer, Sally author.

  Best served cold. – (The Monika Paniatowski mysteries)

  1. Paniatowski, Monika (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Police–England–Fiction. 3. Theatrical companies–

  Fiction. 4. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 5. Detective

  and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8507-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-611-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-662-5 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

  PROLOGUE

  30th March 1957

  He stands at the centre of a small, transient world – alone, save for the stink of violent death. He looks down at the three corpses – the girl, her brother and the man who would have been her husband – then holds up his bloodstained hand, in which he clutches his dagger, to the light.

  There is silence all around.

  Silence from the king, the duke and the viceroy, who are all standing further downstage.

  Silence from those who have paid their money to sit in the darkness and watch the tragedy unfold.

  It is the king who breaks this silence.

  ‘But now what follows for Hieronimo?’ he asks the viceroy.

  He is talking about the man at the centre of the stage, and he still clearly believes that he has been watching a play in which the actors have only pretended to die.

  He is about to learn otherwise.

  Hieronimo walks to the back of the stage, and pulls away a curtain to reveal the fourth corpse – that of his son, Horatio.

  Horatio – as the audience already knows – was murdered by Lorenzo and Balthazar, and now that they are dead, too, Hieronimo is avenged.

  The king, looking down at the fallen Lorenzo and Balthazar, finally realizes that what he has just seen has been no pretence, and is stricken with grief.

  Watching the performance from the wings, Geoff Turnbull was feeling a grief of his own.

  He took a letter – already well-worn through usage – out of his pocket, and held it up to catch what light was available, though, in truth, the light was not necessary because he had already memorized the missive’s contents.

  Dear Mr Turnbull,

  We would like to thank you for all your work at the Whitebridge Theatre in the last twelve years. However, we must regretfully inform you that, in the current economic climate, the theatre gives a poor return on investment, and since we have received a very fair offer from …

  It had been a gutsy decision to choose this play as the company’s last production, he told himself. Most manager-directors would have selected something safer – something easily accessible to an audience more familiar with Christmas pantomimes than with high tragedy. But he had decided to go out with a bang – and that took real balls.

  Or did it? asked a nagging voice at the back of his head.

  After all, whatever play he had chosen, it would have made no difference to the outcome – the theatre would have closed down anyway – so where was the courage in that?

  He pulled his hip flask out of his pocket, and took a generous swig.

  God, he really hated the theatrical world, he told himself.

  Hieronimo – who, in real life, is an actor called Mark Cotton – is still very much centre stage.

  ‘And gentles, thus I end my play, urge no more words, I have no more to say,’ he tells both the audience and his fellow characters.

  He exits, stage left, noticing, as he passes Geoff Turnbull, that the theatre manager seems rather unsteady on his feet.

  He mounts the stairs behind the stage, conscious of the fact that if he wants to maintain the atmosphere he has worked so hard to create, he must make his next entrance on time.

  And he has so little time to prepare, because the dramatist, Thomas Kyd has – in his wisdom – only written four lines of dialogue to cover his absence.

  He reaches the platform, clicks on the harness and reaches for the noose which is hanging from an overhead beam. He takes a step forward and the spotlight hits him.

  He moves closer to the edge of the platform – and hears the audience below gasp.

  They don’t actually think he will jump.

  Of course they don’t!
>
  But he is close enough to the edge of the platform to make them feel uncomfortable.

  He steps out into empty air.

  There are some in the audience who actually scream!

  The harness tightens immediately, under his arms and around his chest. He can feel the rope pressing against his throat, but it is only a minor discomfort, because the harness is taking all the strain.

  Hands grab his arms and heave him back on to the platform. There are groans of relief from down below.

  The cleaners have been complaining all week that some of the audience have actually wet themselves, he thinks, but then what is live theatre – after all – if it isn’t thrilling?

  His hip flask empty, Geoff Turnbull had retreated to the bar. By rights, there should have been no one there except the barman, but there were always some philistines who preferred drink to culture, and that night – a night on which they had reduced bar prices in order to get rid of stock – it was fuller than usual.

  ‘Give me a whisky, Arthur,’ he said. ‘Make it a double.’

  Two middle-aged women were sitting on stools a little further down the bar. They were wearing dresses which were cheap and hurried copies of the sort of dresses theatregoers in London might well be wearing that evening.

  ‘So what do you think of the play, Cynthia?’ one of the women asked the other.

  ‘Well, I don’t really know,’ the second woman confessed. ‘All that killing – it seems a bit unnecessary, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a revenge tragedy, madam,’ Turnbull said, realizing how drunk he sounded, and not really giving a damn. ‘People are supposed to get killed in revenge tragedies.’

  ‘Aren’t you the manager?’ the first woman asked.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ Turnbull affirmed.

  ‘Well, since this was your last show, I thought you might at least have put on a nice musical,’ the woman said.

  It makes you want to weep, Turnbull thought – it just makes you want to bloody weep.

  The bloody play reaches its bloody climax. The soldiers, having prevented Hieronimo hanging himself, drag him back to centre stage, where the king demands he confess who else was involved in the conspiracy. Hieronimo refuses to speak, and when the king threatens him with torture, he bites out his own tongue and spits it on to the stage, which – while not quite as dramatic as the attempted hanging – is dramatic enough.

  There is more bloodletting as Hieronimo manages to get his hands on a knife, which he uses to kill first the Duke of Castile and then himself. And then the chorus – in the form of a ghost and the spirit of Revenge, make a final comment on the events, and the curtain comes down.

  The applause, when the curtain was raised again, could not have been called ecstatic, though only the harshest and bitterest of critics would have described it as rather lukewarm.

  It was a mixed audience, Mark Cotton thought, as he took his bow. There were those who genuinely appreciated top quality acting when they saw it, those who rather liked the gore, those who would have preferred a nice cosy comedy, and those who wished they’d stayed at home and watched the television.

  Well, sod those last three groups!

  And sod Whitebridge as a whole, for not appreciating just how lucky it had been!

  The curtain went down for the last time, and there were the inevitable sounds of seats being raised and people scrambling for the exits.

  As the noise faded, the King of Spain turned to the Viceroy of Portugal and said, ‘Let’s go and get rat-arsed drunk.’

  Joan Turnbull – always a keen observer of the human condition – came to a halt at the entrance to the Green Man’s saloon bar and took a moment to study the group of young people who, until an hour earlier, had all been members of the Whitebridge Players. She was particularly fascinated by the way they had arranged themselves – or had been arranged, perhaps – around the long oblong table. The placement – whether voluntary or gently coerced – would have been no accident. Actors – even young inexperienced ones – were always acutely aware of how they positioned themselves, both on and off the stage.

  Mark Cotton was sitting at the head of the table. That was only to be expected. He was, after all, the leading light of the company. And that was fair enough, because he was a good actor, though not as good as he thought he was, since nobody – in the entire history of the theatre – had ever been that good.

  The interesting thing, however, was where Sarah Audley had chosen to park her pert little behind. For weeks, Sarah had been hanging on to Cotton like a limpet, but now she was sitting at the other end of the table, with her elder sister, Ruth, who had herself made the bed springs squeak with Mark, before – very wisely, in Joan’s opinion – giving him the elbow.

  So what had happened?

  Had Sarah rejected Mark, too?

  It didn’t seem likely, given the mournful glances she was shooting at him when she thought no one was watching.

  And if Mark had been jilted, he was showing no signs of it. In fact, he seemed to be more than happy that the space Sarah had vacated had been filled by Lucy Cavendish, who was pretty enough but rather vacuous.

  ‘Hey, everybody, Joan’s arrived,’ she heard a voice say, and realized that she had been spotted by Tony Brown, who was probably the nicest person in the entire company.

  The rest of them looked and waved at her. She waved back.

  ‘So where’s Geoff?’ Mark Cotton demanded.

  ‘I … err … thought it best to drive him home,’ Joan said. ‘He wasn’t feeling well.’

  Mark snickered. ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said.

  Joan felt a sudden burst of rage.

  ‘Yes, he’s been drinking,’ she admitted. ‘But isn’t that understandable? He’s worked very hard for you – you’ve no idea how hard – and he’s bitterly disappointed at the way things have worked out.’

  The whole cast – with the predictable exception of Mark Cotton – looked slightly embarrassed.

  They blame Geoff for all this, she thought. They believe it’s his fault.

  ‘He has worked hard,’ she persisted. ‘He’s not to blame for the fact that fewer people are going to the theatre these days.’

  ‘Of course he isn’t,’ Tony Brown agreed. ‘Why don’t you come and sit down, Joan?’

  But she couldn’t.

  Not now.

  Not once she’d realized what they were thinking.

  ‘I’d better go back and see how Geoff is getting on,’ she said.

  And no one tried to dissuade her.

  It was not until almost closing time that the subject of Joan Turnbull came up again, though it was obvious, when he spoke, that Tony Brown had been brooding about it since the moment she left.

  ‘You should never have spoken to Joan like that,’ he said, as another tray of pints arrived at the table.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ Mark Cotton asked, aggressively.

  ‘Well, of course he was talking to you,’ said Ruth Audley. ‘Who else was bloody rude to Joan?’

  ‘I wasn’t rude to her,’ Cotton said, slightly more defensive now he felt he might be losing the support of the room. ‘I hardly spoke to her.’

  ‘You didn’t need to speak,’ said Bradley Quirk, who fancied himself as the company’s expert on Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. ‘You’re an actor, dear boy – you can convey your contempt with the slightest twitch of your eyebrow.’

  It could have been a compliment or the opening salvo in an attack. Cotton didn’t know which, and decided that, rather than risk being blindsided, he would go on the attack himself.

  ‘Well, I was right, wasn’t I?’ he demanded. ‘Geoff did let us down. We’re a bloody good company – an excellent company – and now we’re all out of work. Who else is to blame?’

  ‘As Joan said, times are hard …’ Tony Brown said.

  ‘Then why haven’t other companies gone under as well?’

  ‘Perhaps because their leads weren’t two beats too late on a hanging scene,
’ said Jerry Talbot, who had been Cotton’s understudy in The Spanish Tragedy, and was bitterly disappointed that Cotton had not been infected by the flu that was going around.

  ‘I was not late,’ Cotton said hotly. ‘I was—’

  ‘Please, please,’ said Phil McCann, who was generally acknowledged to be the company’s diplomat and smoother of ruffled egos. ‘We’re not here to attack each other. We’ve gathered together to mourn the passing of the Whitebridge Players, but at the same time to celebrate the life of what was an excellent theatre company. Isn’t that right?’

  The others nodded. Phil was so reasonable that it was always difficult to disagree with him openly – even when you did privately. And anyway, on this occasion, he was dead right.

  ‘If we failed, we failed because the public wasn’t ready for us,’ Phil continued. ‘If they did not appreciate our Spanish Tragedy, it is because it was ahead of its time.’

  ‘Ahead of its time, dear boy!’ Bradley Quirk repeated. ‘The bloody play is four hundred years old!’

  ‘Our production – our interpretation – was ahead of its time,’ Phil said levelly. ‘If we were to put it on again twenty years from now, it would be an absolute sensation.’

  ‘Then why don’t we?’ Ruth Audley asked, out of the blue.

  ‘Why don’t we what?’

  ‘Why don’t we put it on twenty years from now?’

  ‘Me thinks my lady has lost her marbles,’ Bradley Quirk said.

  ‘No, listen,’ Ruth insisted. ‘We’re all agreed that we were an excellent company, aren’t we?’

  The others nodded, though some of them were thinking that although that might be stretching the truth a little, the company did have at least one excellent player.

  ‘So why don’t we all come back here in twenty years’ time and put on the play again? It would be sort of like a memorial service for the Whitebridge Players.’