The Sinking Admiral
Page 1
Copyright
Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Collins Crime Club 2016
Copyright © The Detection Club 2016
Cover design by Bold&Noble.com © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008100438
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008100445
Version: 2016-04-27
Dedication
To the memory of P.D. James,
a loyal member of The Detection Club,
who had promised to
write an introduction to this book –
but was sadly prevented from doing so
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
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
About the Contributors
Also in This Series
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
The Floating Admiral ‘by Certain Members of the Detection Club’ was published in 1931, fairly early into the association’s existence. The ‘Certain Members’ who produced that original collaborative novel were, in alphabetical order: Anthony Berkeley, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, G. D. H. and M. Cole, Freeman Wills Crofts, Clemence Dane, Edgar Jepson, Milward Kennedy, Ronald A. Knox, John Rhode, Dorothy L. Sayers, Henry Wade and Canon Victor L. Whitechurch. Since that time the novel has appeared in many foreign editions and been republished twice, by Macmillan in 1981 and by HarperCollins in 2011. The royalties deriving from the book have done much to defray the expenses of the events for which the Detection Club exists, three congenial dinners a year.
Since I took over the Presidency in 2001 I have nurtured the desire to produce another volume ‘by Certain Members of the Detection Club’, partly again to help the association’s finances, but also because I thought it would be fun. The fact that you are reading this book now means that I have succeeded in my ambition.
Of course I owe that achievement to the goodwill, good humour, and literary skills of the other writers who agreed to collaborate on the novel. The Floating Admiral had fourteen contributors (if you count G. D. H. and M. Cole, a married couple who wrote together, as two), and The Sinking Admiral boasts exactly the same number.
There, though, the similarities between the two endeavours cease. In her introduction to the original volume, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: ‘Now, a word about the conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written. Here, the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection… Each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely “to make it more difficult”. He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.’
Now there are a lot of reasons crime writers in the early twenty-first century could not write a collaborative novel by the same method as they could in the early 1930s, and one of the most important is the way in which the genre has changed in the intervening years. Though Dorothy L. Sayers and her band of collaborators had individual styles, they were all basically writing the same kind of book, the classic whodunit. So it was entirely possible to write a chapter, setting up a variety of clues that could be followed and elaborated, and pass on the literary baton to the next writer.
Nowadays that just won’t work because very few authors are actually writing traditional whodunits. Also, crime fiction is now a very broad church. The genre has divided up into a large number of subgenres. There are police procedurals, psychological thrillers, legal thrillers, forensic thrillers, financial thrillers, historical mysteries, and many more. All of these have skilful exponents and enthusiastic fans, but a book that continually jumped from one subgenre to the next would be unlikely to make a lot of sense.
So, early on in the planning for The Sinking Admiral, the decision was made to home in on the individual specialities of the contributing authors. If one of them was an expert in the world of high finance, then he or she should write the chapter about the shifty City financier. The same approach should be followed into the worlds of politics, publishing, journalism, the law, cookery, and so on. Some of the story threads – for instance, the ongoing police investigation – should be followed through by the same writer and interwoven into the rest of the text.
The resulting book, by comparison with The Floating Admiral, turned out therefore to be not so much a sequential game of dominoes as a jigsaw puzzle. And something of an editorial nightmare – enjoyable but complicated.
When everyone had made their main contribution and the book was complete but for its last two chapters, we held a Whodunit Dinner at the Groucho Club. For the contributors able to attend, two questions had to be answered that evening. One, who committed the appalling crimes outlined in the narrative? And two, who was going to write the chapters of the denouement? I am glad to say that both questions were answered with the collaborative ingenuity and geniality that has characterised the entire process of creating The Sinking Admiral.
The way the book was assembled of course offers its readers a second level of whodunitry. Not only will they be trying to identify the perpetrators of any crimes that might occur, they will also be faced with the puzzle of who wrote which bit of the book.
I hope they enjoy this double challenge. And I hope that some of the more acute mystery buffs among them will recognise a few moments of homage to The Floating Admiral and the history of the Detection Club.
In bringing The Sinking Admiral on the arduous journey to publication, I would like to thank David Brawn and Julia Wisdom of HarperCollins for their enthusiasm for the project, the Detection Club’s agent Georgia Glover of David Higham for her s
upport, and particularly Corinne Hitching, the Club’s Assistant Secretary, for managing to take coherent notes from the complicated and frequently hilarious planning meetings between the contributors.
Now it’s over to you, the reader. Hope you enjoy it.
Simon Brett – President of the Detection Club 2001–2015
CHAPTER ONE
It’s amazing the attraction television has for ordinary people. Not watching the wretched box, but appearing on it. People seem prepared to undergo any kinds of humiliation for one brief moment of having their faces seen in the nation’s sitting rooms. And that situation’s got worse since the unrestricted spread of so-called ‘reality’ shows.
A demonstration of this syndrome was being acted out at the Admiral Byng pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell. It was a March Monday, one of those biting cold ones when it seemed that winter would never release its icy hold. The much-quoted view that in that part of Suffolk there was no protection from the cold winds off the Ural Mountains was wheeled out once again in many huddles around village fireplaces. It was a time of year when business at the Admiral Byng would normally have been even worse than usual, but on this particular March day the pub was heaving. And that was because word had got around Crabwell that a television documentary was being made there.
The programme was being fronted and produced by Ben Milne, a journalist in his early thirties, highly skilled in the business of turning cameras on people long enough for them to make fools of themselves. And then working on the footage in the editing suite to make them look even more stupid.
He had cut his teeth on an ITV series called Skeletons in the Cupboard, which tapped into the growing online enthusiasm for genealogy. But, unlike the previous, more benign BBC version of the show, whose high spot was always making the celebrity subject cry, Ben Milne’s programme basically tried to dig the dirt on the celebrity’s antecedents. Illegitimate births were gloated over, appearances in the Newgate Calendar, and transportations to Australia were welcomed with open arms. And involvement in the Slave Trade or a murder enquiry proved to be pure televisual gold. As with many ITV programmes, Skeletons in the Cupboard was a red-top interpretation of the BBC’s more sedate original.
Of course, when discussed by Ben Milne, he was keen to emphasise the series’ serious agenda, and he spoke in just the same way about the documentary he was making in Crabwell. At a time when across the country up to twenty pubs were closing every week, it was, as he would state in his sober-faced introduction, ‘important to focus on the realities of the licensed victuallers’ business, which is why I have brought my cameras to a typical, traditional English pub, the Admiral Byng in Crabwell’. He was a good-looking young man with very short hair and brown eyes, which he knew how to make look caring and empathetic. He switched on their full charm as he told each member of the Admiral Byng’s staff and the regulars how much he hoped his documentary would help save their village pub from the fate of so many others.
Amy Walpole, the bar manager, was not taken in by him. She was red-haired, freckled, tall, thin as a rake, with the kind of supple body that men drool over. And from her position behind the counter she had witnessed much drooling as evenings lengthened and her customers got more drunk. But Amy wasn’t taken in by any of it. Experiences from her varied emotional history had rendered her, now in her late thirties, immune to the manipulations of men. She no longer nurtured hopes – or at least she would never admit to anyone that she nurtured hopes – that somewhere out there was the perfect partner for her. So, while recognising that Ben Milne was attractive, she also recognised that he was not the kind of man to be trusted further than she could throw him. In fact, she thought he was probably a bit of a prick.
Nor was she taken in by his assurances that his television programme would turn around the fortunes of the Admiral Byng. Her job as bar manager made Amy Walpole all too aware of the dwindling profits of the business. Winters were always bad, but none had been as bad as the one that was currently extending its stay into March. All the factors gloomily detailed by the newspapers – general belt-tightening, ever more expensive fuel, the availability of cheap beer and spirits in supermarkets – were having their effects on the Admiral Byng. The rest of the staff weren’t aware of how close to the wind they were sailing, but Amy was kept up to date with bad news by the pub’s owner.
Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, landlord of the Admiral Byng, must have been well into his seventies. He was never referred to, incidentally, by his full name. The closest anyone got to that was calling him ‘Fitz’. But more often – and perhaps inevitably – he was known as ‘the Admiral’. Certainly that was how all the pub staff referred to him. His bluff manner and drawling vowels, together with his silver hair and moustache, his uniform of gold-buttoned blazer and cravat, gave the impression of a patrician public-school background, but nobody in Crabwell actually knew much about his past. There was also a common assumption, from the way he talked, that at one stage of his life he had been extremely rich. Some of the staff, gossiping in the kitchen, believed he still was.
Well, if that were the case, Amy Walpole knew his wealth didn’t come from the Admiral Byng. She was too close to the account books to believe that. And from conversations with the Admiral she recognised how genuinely anxious he was about the future of his business. The idea that Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons had a vast fortune stashed away somewhere and wasn’t using it to bail the pub out just didn’t make sense. Apart from anything else, although the kitchen and casual bar staff had received their regular stipend, Amy Walpole herself had not been paid for three weeks. The Admiral kept saying he would regularise the situation ‘soon’, but she knew that the money just wasn’t there.
Amy liked her boss. He could be infuriating, though. He was one of those alcoholics who never appears to be drunk, but is just permanently topping himself up. His constant tipple was red wine – preferably something robust and French, he didn’t believe in all this new-fangled New World rubbish – but in the evenings he could also get a long way down a bottle of malt whisky. Laphroaig was his favourite. What effect his lifetime’s drinking had had on his health Amy didn’t like to speculate. The Admiral himself always said that if he gave up the booze his body would drop dead from sheer shock.
He was also, by her standards, something of a Luddite. He didn’t even use a mobile phone. ‘When I’m home people can ring me on the pub number,’ he always said. ‘And when I’m not home they can leave me a message. No telephone call is so important that it can’t wait a couple of hours.’
Fitz’s dinosaur attitudes applied to other technology as well. Amy had had to argue for a long time to persuade him to upgrade his old bar-room till to a more user-friendly electronic model. And her strongest powers of persuasion were also required to get him to buy a laptop and printer for the pub’s tiny office. But the idea of touching either of the devices was anathema to him. Fitz, Amy often thought, would have been happiest living in the 1950s, before any of this troubling technology had become available to the general public.
Whether he’d ever been married or in any kind of permanent relationship no one knew. Certainly there had been no romantic skirmishes since he’d moved to Crabwell. Amy knew she was an attractive woman, and long experience in the pub trade had inured her to the advances of landlords, but the Admiral had never so much as touched her on the shoulder. She was certain he wasn’t gay, but his emotional history – like many other areas of his life – remained unknown to the people of the village.
In spite of the more annoying aspects of his personality, Amy still had a fierce loyalty to the Admiral, remembering the generosity with which he had welcomed her when she first arrived in Crabwell.
She had been quite surprised, though, when he’d agreed to the intrusion into his pub of Ben Milne and the camera crew. She didn’t think he would buy into the theory of the publicity bestowed by the documentary turning around the Admiral Byng’s fortunes, and it seemed out of character for him deliberately to
threaten his protective secrecy. But there was no doubt that the television people were there with the Admiral’s consent.
They didn’t see much of him, though, on that first day of filming. Running the whole width of the Admiral Byng’s first floor there was a long, low gallery. In a previous incarnation it had acted as the pub’s function room, but fewer and fewer people in the Crabwell area seemed to be having functions these days. Or maybe for weddings, birthdays, and post-funeral wakes they now booked venues slightly less shabby than the village pub.
Besides, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons had rather colonised the space for himself. Though his bedroom was on the floor above, this gallery, which he referred to ironically as ‘the Bridge’, was where he spent most of the time when he was not downstairs in the bar. And the clutter of his files and documents had spread over time until there was no surface in the room uncovered. It was from the Bridge, with its broad view across the steely expanse of the North Sea, that the Admiral conducted his business. But none of his employees was bold enough ever to ask him what that business was.
On the first day of Ben Milne’s filming at the Admiral Byng the landlord spent most of his time up in the Bridge. Amy Walpole had been kept so busy at the bar dealing with the uncharacteristic flood of custom that she hadn’t checked them out in detail, but she’d been aware throughout the day of a procession of visitors going up the side stairs to visit the Admiral. Presumably he’d made some private arrangement with Ben Milne to be interviewed another day. There was no way the journalist was going to make his film without talking to the Admiral Byng’s landlord.
Amy Walpole’s unenthusiastic attitude to the invasion of documentary-makers was not typical of the Admiral Byng’s staff and regulars. Most of them responded with the customary reaction of ordinary people to the prospect of being ‘on the telly’. They all wanted their fifteen seconds of fame.