The Sinking Admiral

by The Detection Club

  Of no one was this truer than Meriel Dane, the queen of the pub’s kitchen. Honey blonde since anyone could remember, and always dressed a good ten years younger than her real age; she was a woman of unbridled aspiration. Nobody who didn’t dwell inside Meriel Dane’s head could be aware of the glorious futures she constantly created for herself (despite some less than successful experiences in her past). Frequently these fantasies involved impossibly glamorous men who would succumb to her substantial charms, but she had career ambitions too. Meriel Dane was convinced that she was about to become the next big thing in television chefs, so she regarded her participation in Ben Milne’s documentary as a kind of audition.

  ‘You see, Ben,’ she confided as she rolled out the pastry for the day’s pies, ‘I always add a couple of special ingredients when I’m doing steak and kidney. They impart a subtlety to the taste, which is commented on by many of the Admiral Byng’s customers. Satisfied customers, I should say. People who order my steak and kidney pie never regret their choice. They are always satisfied. One of my secret ingredients,’ she went on slyly, almost winking at the camera, ‘is Worcester sauce – just a little shake of the bottle into the mixture. I’m never one for measuring things too exactly. I have an instinct for the right amount. Most of my cooking is instinctive. I am rather a creature of impulse, you know.’

  She leaned forward to the camera, fully aware of the amount of ample cleavage that the movement revealed. It was Meriel Dane’s view that there was a lack of glamour in the current stock of television chefs. Most of them were men, for a start – and not very attractive men at that. What British television needed was a series by someone who put the sex back into cookery. Someone remarkably like Meriel Dane, in fact.

  ‘And my other secret ingredient, Ben, no one suspects. But being here by the sea in Crabwell – and me being the kind of person who is really drawn to the sea, I do add a little maritime flavour to my steak and kidney. Oysters. Not a lot of them – it’s not a steak and oyster pie – but just enough to provide that little salty tang. And nobody – but nobody – can identify what gives the pie that oh so distinctive flavour.’

  Meriel Dane smiled. A warm smile, promising who knew what delights ahead. She reckoned the little piece she’d just done to camera, confiding the secrets of her steak and kidney pie, would edit neatly into a show reel to engage the enthusiasm of even the most jaded television executive.

  She looked at her watch and felt a little frisson, knowing the delights that lay ahead for her that evening… if she played her cards right… and Meriel Dane was always confident in her ability to play her cards right. In the meantime, flirting with Ben Milne was a reasonably pleasant way of passing the time. He was quite attractive in an angular way, and Meriel Dane always rather fancied herself in the role of cougar.

  And then Ben went and spoiled it all by asking her about the budgetary restrictions on the Admiral Byng’s food operation.

  Because they had driven up from London that morning, Ben Milne’s cameraman Stan, according to some abstruse ruling known only to his union, had to stop work at five for a three-hour break. He left then, and went to the B & B in a nearby village, which he’d booked in preference to one of the Admiral Byng’s bedrooms. Ben, though, was staying in the pub. Unable to shoot any further footage for the time being, he bought himself a large glass of Chilean Merlot and sat in a corner of the bar, drinking as though he’d earned it. Amy Walpole still didn’t trust him. Though without his cameraman he couldn’t actually record anything that happened, she still sensed that he was vigilant, listening out for those telling details that might contribute something to his eventual hatchet job.

  But the absence of the camera had an immediate effect on the day’s business. All of those locals who kept away from the Admiral Byng most of the year but had ‘just happened to drop in’ that day suddenly vanished when there was no further chance of them being immortalised on video. Though Amy was in no doubt that a lot of them would be back the following morning.

  The stresses of the day were catching up on her. She’d been so busy that she hadn’t had a chance to get any lunch and she felt headachey. What she needed was a brisk walk along the Crabwell front to blow away the cobwebs. And Ben Milne was now the only customer in the bar.

  Grabbing from its hook the beaten-up Barbour jacket that Fitz had given her, Amy Walpole told him she had to go out for a while. If he needed a refill or anything else before she was back, he should call through to Meriel in the kitchen. She’d help him out.

  The wind from the Urals was predictably invigorating once she got outside, but Amy was used to it. All the Crabwell locals instinctively adopted a particular stance, leaning into the wind as they walked. Amy comforted herself with the thought that at least it wasn’t raining. But the weather was dull and miserable, almost impossible to see where the slate grey of the sky met the slate grey of the sea. It was one of those Suffolk afternoons when there wouldn’t really be a dusk, just a darkening of the grey until it was imperceptibly transformed into black.

  There weren’t many people about, though a little way up the beach Amy could see a group of Girl Guides struggling against the wind to erect some tents on the shingle. She remembered the girls’ leader Greta Knox telling her they had some camping exercise planned, though it didn’t look much fun on a cold March evening. She recognised Greta’s stocky outline amongst the girls, and waved vaguely in her direction. Whether Greta saw her or not, she couldn’t judge.

  Amy also saw, lingering on the edge of the group, trying to avoid doing anything useful, a girl called Tracy Crofts to whom she had more than once refused service at the bar of the Admiral Byng. In spite of her protestations, Amy knew the girl to be underage. There was a general view in Crabwell that it was only a matter of time before Tracy Crofts, a seething mass of teenage hormones, came to no good.

  Amy Walpole lived in a dilapidated little seafront cottage only five minutes’ walk from the pub, and she felt a strong temptation to go home, however briefly. Just to put her feet up, have a cup of tea. But she resisted the impulse. She knew how much more difficult it would be to force herself back to work if she succumbed to home comforts.

  So she walked determinedly in the opposite direction from her cottage. Towards the end of the beach where, drawn up on the sand, there were a lot of boats. Including the dinghy owned by her boss. No surprise really that its name, picked out in silver stick-on letters across the stern, was The Admiral.

  More of a surprise, though, that afternoon, was that the boat’s owner was standing by it, checking the cords that tied down the tarpaulin cover from which the mast protruded. He wore no overcoat, just his usual blazer.

  ‘Evening, Admiral,’ said Amy.

  ‘Hello there.’ There was an uncharacteristic air of complacency in his smile, of relief almost, as if he had just achieved something very necessary.

  ‘Problems with the cover?’

  ‘Just checking it, Amy. There have been rather too many thefts from boats on the beach here recently.’

  ‘Have you got much of value in there?’

  ‘Now that’d be telling,’ he replied with an enigmatic grin.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen you today.’

  ‘No, I’ve been busy in the Bridge.’

  ‘So I gathered. And you haven’t talked yet to Ben Milne, the Grand Inquisitor?’

  ‘No. That pleasure is scheduled for tomorrow. Seems to me to be a rather cocky young man.’

  ‘I think if you work in television that goes with the territory.’

  He grinned, then his face clouded as he said, ‘Also, Amy, you and I need to have a long talk.’

  ‘Really?’ She spread her hands wide. ‘Well, I’m happy to talk now.’

  ‘No, no.’ The Admiral shook his grey head. ‘That will keep till tomorrow too. I have other plans for tonight.’

  ‘And what do they involve?’

  ‘Tonight, Amy, is to be my “Last Hurrah”. I plan to get extremely drunk.’

 
‘Oh. Drunker than usual?’

  ‘Very definitely.’

  ‘Are you celebrating?’

  ‘Something like that,’ replied the Admiral, with a teasing hint of mischief in his voice.

  But as it turned out, he never did have an inquisition from Ben Milne. Or his long talk with Amy Walpole. Because, by the next morning, the Admiral was dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Amy, my dear, another round for everyone, please,’ said the Admiral, placing a steadying hand on the bar. His silk handkerchief drooped drunkenly out of his blazer breast pocket, and his silver hair looked as though someone had been running their fingers through it.

  Amy knew better than to query her boss’s request, however unusual it was. ‘What’ll it be, folks?’ she shouted.

  The peace of the late afternoon had vanished. With the return of Stan, Ben’s cameraman, word had spread via the usual jungle drums that kept the inhabitants of Crabwell up to speed with the latest developments, and the bar was once again full. Incongruously out of place among the regulars were a bunch of Viking re-enactors, dressed in the full kit and waving rustic-looking tankards. Amy had been a bar manager far too long to find anything strange about their presence. In her line of work you served everyone and didn’t ask questions.

  She looked around for other locals and saw Crabwell’s GP, Dr Alice Kennedy, who quite often dropped in at the end of evening surgery. She was, as ever, smartly but unobtrusively dressed, on this occasion in black trousers and a navy blue blazer. Amy never quite knew whether Alice came in just for a relaxing drink or to monitor the intake of her patients. Though perfectly friendly, the doctor always seemed slightly aloof from the other barroom regulars. But maybe a level of professional detachment went with the job.

  The same could have been said of Crabwell’s vicar, the Rev Victoria Whitechurch. She wasn’t a regular in the pub, but she had been there for the ‘Last Hurrah’. Maybe she was on the lookout to see which of her parishioners overindulged. Or perhaps she was on a proselytising mission, hoping to enlist more locals into the diminishing ranks of her congregations at St Mary’s.

  The Admiral was holding court. This was the second of the rounds he’d bought for everyone present. Amy supplied the flood of orders with her usual efficiency, noting that if this kept up, she would have to descend to the cellar and switch to a new barrel of the draught bitter. However, most orders were for spirits, and she rang up the Admiral’s tab with a feeling that approached despair. The state of the pub’s finances could not justify this random largesse. Then she asked herself, what did she know? The old boy could have come into some unexpected funds. Maybe that would explain the odd procession of folk he’d had climbing to his Bridge throughout the day.

  At what time tomorrow, she wondered, would she receive a summons for the talk he’d promised her? And what would it be about? Amy looked at the happy crowd of villagers and others from further afield, and hoped it was not going to be to tell her that he was selling up. Equally, she hoped that he didn’t want to probe into those details of her past life that she wished to keep secret.

  ‘This a common occurrence, your boss pushing the boat out?’ Ben, the ever-present television presenter, leaned on the bar and shoved his whisky glass towards her. ‘You can make mine a double Glenlivet,’ he added.

  She didn’t answer his question, but looked at his brown eyes, twinkling at her with confident warmth, took the glass and fished out the required bottle, thankful he hadn’t asked for the peaty Laphroaig that was the Admiral’s favourite tipple. What was it about brown eyes that could melt a little piece of the steel she had built around her badly bruised heart?

  Amy pushed the filled tumbler towards the presenter and looked at the Admiral, now climbing up on a Windsor chair and raising his glass.

  ‘My friends, here’s to the “Last Hurrah”,’ he said, and the reckless gleam in his eye did nothing to reassure his bar manager.

  ‘“The Last Hurrah”,’ Ben murmured, raising his own glass. ‘And what’s that all about, eh?’

  ‘No idea.’ She came around from behind the bar and started clearing empty glasses, lining them up on the counter.

  ‘Tell us,’ shouted someone to the Admiral, ‘tell us about the time you were stranded in the Caribbean.’

  ‘Ah!’ he smiled benignly at them. For the last few weeks he had worn worry like a mother whose son was about to go to war, now it was as though peace had been declared. A slurp of Laphroaig and a long stare into the distance, then he began: ‘Antigua was on our port bow and a hurricane was beating up behind us. We would have to anchor down in Nelson’s Harbour and ride it out.’

  ‘Was he really ever a sailor?’ Ben pushed the flotilla of dirty glasses a little further to the back of the counter to give Amy space for another trayful.

  ‘Thanks,’ she muttered. ‘How about helping me collect the last of the empties?’

  ‘But I might drop them!’ He looked at her with limpidly innocent eyes and leaned back on his stool, surveying the scene. Amy followed his gaze. The Admiral might have been at the wheel of his schooner (a large photograph of the long-gone actual boat was on the wall of the bar, the wind filling its sails, including the spinnaker, the craft leaning forward with the urgency of a greyhound released from the traps). There was the slightest uncertainty in his stance on his chair, his customary drawl wobbled a bit, and the occasional fumbling for a word as he retold the familiar story, suggested he was deep in alcohol’s grip.

  Then Amy saw that Stan, the cameraman, had his lens trained with steady accuracy on the Admiral Byng’s landlord, relishing the opportunity of showing him up. ‘You bastard,’ she shot at Ben and headed for her boss.

  ‘… and as we hunkered down under a wind wilder than horses freaked out of their senses and a rain that emptied the heavens, we old mariners swapped stories of weird adventures. And that was when…’ the Admiral lowered his voice, and his audience waited in gleeful anticipation. ‘That was when I heard tell of the Treasure of the Forgotten Island.’

  ‘And it’s still forgotten!’ someone shouted out as Amy barged into Stan, knocking his camera off its target. ‘The island and its gold ingots, all forgotten.’ Most of the audience had heard the story more than once.

  Stan swore, lifted his camera, and glared at Amy. ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

  ‘It’s so crowded tonight,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Can hardly move in here. Having trouble, are you?’ She picked up an empty glass and blocked his view as she moved towards her boss.

  The Admiral ran a finger over his silver moustache. ‘Ah, well,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Somewhere there’s a map, and some time I’ll be going back. And when I get my rightful fortune, it’ll be drinks all around every night.’

  ‘What rightful fortune?’ demanded one of the Viking re-enactors raucously.

  ‘Ah, wouldn’t you like to know?’ Fitz replied slyly. ‘Let’s just say that things here are changing. My fortune has turned around. Money worries will be at an end, family secrets will be revealed, and the Admiral Byng will be saved! Here’s to the “Last Hurrah”!’

  The vigour with which he raised his arm for the toast nearly overbalanced him. Amy reached out a hand and helped him down from the chair.

  Ben appeared. ‘Is there really a map?’ he asked the Admiral respectfully. ‘I’d love to see it. Treasure Island has always been one of my favourite books.’

  ‘Has it now? So you like stories of buried treasure, do you?’

  ‘Certainly do,’ said Ben. Amy saw him make a subtle sign to Stan that had to mean he should capture this scene on his camera. No doubt he was hoping for more footage of what he’d refer to in his presenterese as ‘Fitz’s lovable eccentricity’. ‘And you say the treasure is buried somewhere in the Caribbean?’

  ‘That treasure is,’ the Admiral replied judiciously. ‘Though you might do better looking for ill-gotten gold rather nearer to home.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Ben eagerly.

  ‘W
hat indeed?’ The Admiral’s eyes gleamed with what Amy recognised as his mischievous look. It did her heart good to see it back. She had been worried by Fitz’s lack of animation over the past few weeks. ‘Well, perhaps we can have a talk about that tomorrow,’ he went on. ‘I think tomorrow is going to be full of all kinds of revelations.’

  ‘Guilty secrets about Crabwell’s drug fiends, illegitimate children, and rich old people murdered in their beds?’ suggested Ben Milne.

  Really, thought Amy, was this how he tried to get his interviewees onto the scurrilous gossip tack? She’d thought he would be more subtle.

  The Admiral, however, was too canny to give any response that might provide titillation for Ben’s viewers. ‘That kind of thing, yes,’ he said, his intonation firmly suggesting that the subject was closed.

  Ben looked as though he would like to keep grilling Fitz, but instead he was nobbled by the Reverend Victoria Whitechurch. ‘Mr Milne, we need to have a talk about spreading the word of God. If you want to get a full impression of what life in the village is like, you and your cameraman will, I hope, be with us in church next Sunday?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll be finished with filming and back in London by then.’

  ‘But maybe you could come and visit St Mary’s tomorrow? It’s in terrible need of repair, and if its condition was seen on national television, it might—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ben quite brusquely, ‘the subject of my documentary is the pub, not the church.’ The vicar recoiled, suitably snubbed.

  Amy went back behind the bar and started washing up the dirty glasses. Someone came and asked for the bar menu. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Last orders were twenty minutes ago. The kitchen’s closed.’ It was a shame. The pub hadn’t been this full since Christmas, and a little earlier she’d asked Meriel if she’d be prepared to take orders beyond the usual cut-off point.