However, the smart money around the older citizens of the town had it that the “gift” was actually a means to eradicate the excessive gambling debts run up by the gruff mill-owner’s son-cum-sculptor in the hotel’s extensive gambling casino, a huge two floor area in the belly of the hotel that had since been refashioned and refurbished after the Great War into a ballroom.
To say that hotels in Luddersedge were thin on the ground was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Although there were countless guest houses, particularly along Honey dew Lane beside the notorious Bentley’s Tannery – whose ever-present noxious fumes seemed to be unnoticed by the guests – usually truck drivers, who stayed there as a mid-way point on the long haul from Glasgow to the South Coast, parking their rigs on the spare ground between Carholme Place and Car-holme Drive – the Regal was the only full-blown hotel, and the only building other than the old town hall to stretch above the slate roofs of Luddersedge and scratch a sky oblivious to, and entirely disinterested in, its or even the town’s existence.
The corridors of the Regal were lined with threadbare carpets, hemmed in by walls bearing a testimonial trinity of mildew, graffiti and spilled alcohol, and topped by ceilings whose anaglypta was peeling at the corners and whose streaky paint-covering had been long ago dimmed by cigarette smoke.
The rooms themselves boasted little in the way of the creature comforts offered by the Regal’s big-town contemporaries in Halifax and Burnley.
Only the Albert, Calder and Bickerdyke suites on the fourth floor featured tea – and coffee-making facilities, not to mention sufficient room to swing a cat . . . should such an activity be desired (though deplorable TV reception and the absence of satellite or cable-fed hotel movies imbued even the most unusual in-room entertainment with dizzily heightened credibility and attraction).
The truth, however, was that the Regal’s guests brought their own entertainment in the form of a partner whose intimate attentions they might enjoy amidst the carbolic soap-smelling bed linen rather than propped against the building walls surrounding the club district of the metropolis of Halifax or parked up in one of the pull-ins overlooking Todmorden, testing the suspension and upholstery of old cars whose MOTs had been just a little too readily granted by Pete Dickinson or Tony Manderson at Tony’s garage over on Eldershot Road.
Such activities were entirely safe inasmuch that, while the Regal’s facilities were often found lacking, the discretion of the staff was legendary . . . and with room rates being so modest, even with breakfast added on, an additional gratuity in the form of a folded fiver jammed into the hand of the appropriately named manager Sidney Poke or one of his team was a small price to pay for uninterrupted passion in the relative comfort and complete anonymity accorded by the Regal.
For most of the year, the Regal’s register – if such a thing were ever to be filled in, which it rarely was . . . at least accurately – boasted only couples by the name of Smith or Jones, and the catering staff had little to prepare in the form of sustenance other than the fabled Full English Breakfast, truly the most obscenely mountainous start-of-the-day plate of food outside of Dublin. Indeed, questions were frequently asked in bread shop or bus stop queues and around the beer-slopped pub tables at the Working Men’s Club as to exactly how the Regal kept going.
But there were far too many other things to occupy the attention and interest of Luddersedge’s townsfolk and, anyway, most of them recognized the important social part played by the Regal in the lives of their not-so-distant cousins living in the towns a few miles down the road in either direction . . . just as they recognized the equally important part played for themselves by similar establishments in those same towns. There were far too many scarf-bedecked Juliets and blue-collar Romeos – some young and some not so young – who had taken advantage of such no-questions-asked solitude . . . some long ago, when their flesh seemed more artistically arranged, and some only a day or two earlier, when they had supposedly been visiting relatives in far-off Leeds or Manchester or delivering a van-load of unpronounceable grommet-type things down to Birmingham or up to Newcastle: after all, it didn’t do to defecate on one’s own doorstep, and the status quo could only ever be maintained by not asking awkward questions.
Not that awkward questions were not asked about other situations in which the Regal played a key role, one of which came to pass on a Saturday night in early December on the occasion of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party . . . and which involved the one hotel feature that was truly magnificent – the Gentlemen’s toilet situated in the basement beneath the ballroom.
To call such a sprawling display of elegance and creative indulgence a loo or a bog – or even a john or a head, to use the slang vernacular popular with the occasional Americans who visited the Calder Valley in the 1950s, the heyday of Luddersedge’s long-forgotten twinning with the mid west town of Forest Plains – was tantamount to heresy.
Listen to this:
A row of shoulder-height marble urinals – complete with side panels that effectively rendered invisible anyone of modest height who happened to be availing themselves of their facility – was completed by a series of carefully angled glass panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorkshire stone squares and rectangles of a multitude of colours. It was an area worn smooth by generations of men temporarily intent on emptying bladders filled with an excess of John Smith’s, Old Peculiar and Black Sheep bitter ales served in the bars above.
Two wide steps down from the urinals, set back and mounted on ornate embellishments of curlicued brass fashioned to resemble a confusion of vines interlinked with snakes, a row of generously sized washbasins nested beneath individual facing panels split one half mirror and the other reinforced glass. The glass halves looked through onto an identical set of basins on the other side of the partition and behind them stood the WCs.
It was these wood-panelled floor-to-ceiling enclosed retreats – with their individual light switches, oak toilet seats and covers and matching tissue dispensers, and stained glass backings behind the pipe leading from the overhead cistern – that were, perhaps, the room’s crowning glory, being even more impressive than the worn leather sofas and wing-backed chairs situated on their own dais at the far end of the toilet, bookended by towering aspidistras and serviced by standing silver ashtrays and glass-topped tables bearing the latest issues of popular men’s magazines.
But while these extravagant rooms – albeit small rooms, designed for but one purpose – had rightly gained some considerable fame (particularly as the town was not noted for anything even approaching artistic or historical significance) they had also achieved a certain notoriety that was not always welcome.
Such notoriety came not from merely from the time, in the late 1940s, when an exceptionally inebriated Jack Walker (father of the unfortunate Stanley, who was to meet his tragic end at the hands of his wife when she administered a lethal dose of EXTERMINATE! into his bottle of beer) pitched forward rather unexpectedly – after failing to register the aforementioned double step leading to the urinals – and smashed his head into one of the glass-panelled splashguards. The accident resulted in the loss of Jack’s left eye which, Jack being reluctant to wear a patch covering the now vacant socket (“Makes me look like a bloody pirate,” Jack remarked to his friend Alan, down at the steel mill one morning soon after the incident), was replaced by a strangely coloured (and shaped, for that matter) orb that more resembled the marbles his then six-year-old son Stan delighted in firing across the living room carpet than an eye.
Nor did it come only from the legendary night when Pete Dickinson was ceremoniously divested of all of his clothes on his stag night and reduced to escaping the Regal, staggering drunkenly through Luddersedge’s cold spring streets, wearing only one of the toilet’s continuous hand towels (those being the days before automatic hand dryers, of course), a 50-foot ribbon of linen that gave the quickly sobering Dickinson the appearance of a cr
oss between Julius Caesar and Boris Karloff’s mummy.
Rather, the toilet’s somewhat dubious reputation stemmed solely from the fact that, over the years, its lavish cubicles had seen a stream of Luddersedge’s finest and most virile young men venturing into their narrow enclosures with their latest female conquests for a little session of hi-jinks where, their minds (and, all too often, their prowess and sexual longevity) clouded by the effects of ale, a surfeit of testosterone, the threat of being discovered, they would perform loveless couplings to the muted strains of whatever music drifted down from the floor above.
The practice was known, in the less salubrious circles of Calder Valley drinking establishments, as “The Forty Five Steps Club”. The name referred, in a version of the similar “honorary” appellation afforded those who carried out the same act on an in-flight aeroplane (“The Mile High Club”), to the toilet’s distance below ground – three perilously steep banks of fifteen steps leading down from the ballroom’s west entrance.
And so it was that, at precisely 10 o’clock on the fateful night of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, it was to this bastion room of opulence and renown that Arthur Clark retired midway through a plate of turkey, new potatoes, broccoli and carrots (having already seen off several pints of John Smith’s, an entire bowl of dry roasted peanuts – Planters, Arthur’s favourite – and the Regal’s obligatory prawn cocktail first course) to evacuate both bladder and bowel. It was a clockwork thing with Arthur and, no matter where he was nor whom he was with, he would leave whatever was going on to void himself – on this occasion, all the better to concentrate his full attention and gastric juices on the promised (though some might say “threatened”) Christmas Pudding and rum sauce plus a couple of coffees, and a few glasses of Bells whisky. Arthur’s slightly weaving departure from the ballroom, its back end filled with a series of long dining tables leaving the area immediately in front of the stage free for the inevitable dancing that would follow coffee and liqueurs, was to be the last time that his fellow guests saw him alive.
“Edna. Edna!” Betty Thorndike was leaning across the table trying to get Edna Clark’s attention, while one of the Merkinson twins – Betty thought it was Hilda but she couldn’t be sure, they both looked so alike – returned to her seat and dropped her handbag onto the floor beside her. Hilda – if it was Hilda – had been to the toilet more than fifteen minutes ago, while everyone else was still eating, her having bolted her food down in record time, and had spent the time since her return talking to Agnes Olroyd, as though she didn’t want to come back and join them: they were a funny pair, the Merkinsons.
When Edna turned around, from listening – disinterestedly – to John and Mary Tullen’s conversation about conservatories with Barbara Ashley and her husband, whose name she could never remember (it was Kenneth), she was frowning.
“What?”
“He’s been a long time, hasn’t he?” she said across the table, nodding to the watch on her wrist. “Your Arthur.”
“He’s had a lot,” Edna said with a shrug. The disc jockey on the stage put on Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”.
“Oh, I love this me,” Mary Tullen announced to the table, droopy-eyed, and promptly began trying to join in with the words, cigarette smoke drifting out of her partially open mouth. She took a long drink of wine and frowned. “Who is it again? Name’s on the tip of my tongue.”
Edna shook her head.
“What was it like?” the Merkinson twin who had been to the toilet said to the one who had not.
A shrug was the reply. “You’ve been a long time, Hilda,” she said, pushing her plate forward. Hilda noted that the food had been shuffled around on the plate but not much had been eaten.
“Been talking to Agnes Olroyd.”
“So I saw.”
“She was asking me about the robbery,” Hilda said.
“Robbery? I thought you said nothing had been taken.”
Hilda shrugged. “Robbery, break-in – it’s all the same thing.”
Hilda worked at the animal testing facility out on Aldershot Road where, two days earlier, she had come into work to discover someone had broken in during the night – animal rights protesters, her boss Ian Arbutt had told the police – and trashed the place.
Not wanting to talk about the break-in again – it having been a source of conversation everywhere in the town the past 36 hours, particularly in the Merkinson twins’ small two-up, two-down in Belmont Drive – Hilda’s sister said, “How’s her Eric?”
Hilda made a face. “His prostate’s not so good,” she said.
“Oh.” Harriet’s attention seemed more concentrated on Edna Clark.
As Mary elbowed her husband in the stomach, prising his attention away from a young woman returning to a nearby table with breasts that looked like they had been inflated, Betty Thorndike said to Edna, “D’you think he’s all right?”
John Tullen spun around, glaring at his wife. “What?”
“Who, my Arthur?” Edna said.
“D’you know who’s singing this song?” Mary asked her husband. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“I’m surprised you can sense anything with that tongue,” John said as he reached for his pint of Guinness. “You’ve near on pickled the bloody thing tonight. Whyn’t you slow down a bit?”
Edna said, “He’s fine. He always goes at this time. Regular as clockwork. Doesn’t matter where he is.” This last revelation was accompanied by a slight shake of her head that seemed to convey both amazement and despair.
“I know,” Mary Tullen agreed, still wondering who it was that was singing. “It’s common knowledge, your Arthur’s regularity.” She had trouble getting her mouth around the word “regularity”, splitting it into three single-syllabled words with the following “ity” barely covering a watery burp. “‘Scuse me,” Mary said.
“But he’s been a long time.” Betty nodded to Arthur’s unfinished meal. “And he hasn’t even finished his dinner.”
“He’ll finish it when he gets back,” Edna said with assurance.
Behind her, somebody said, “There’s no bloody paper down there.”
Hilda Merkinson knocked her glass over and a thin veil of lager spilled across the table and onto her sister’s lap. “Hilda! For goodness sake.”
“Damn it,” Hilda said.
Edna threw a spare serviette across the table and turned around. Billy Roberts was sliding into his seat on the next table.
Sitting across from Billy, Jack Hanlon burst into a loud laugh. “You didn’t use your hands again, did you, Billy? You’ll never sell any meat on Monday – smell’ll be there for days.”
Billy smiled broadly and held his hand out beneath his friend’s nose. Jack pulled back so quickly he nearly upturned his chair. He took a drink of Old Peculiar, swallowed and shook a B&H out of a pack lying on the table. “If you must know,” Billy said, lighting the cigarette and blowing a thick cloud up towards the ceiling, “I used my hanky.” He made a play of reaching into his pocket. “But I washed it out, see—” And he pretended to throw something across the table to his friend. This time, gravity took its toll and Jack went over backwards into the aisle.
As Jack got to his feet and righted his chair, Billy said, “I flushed it, didn’t I, daft bugger. But I was worried for a few minutes when I saw there wasn’t any paper – course, by that time, I’d done the deed. When I got out, I checked all the WCs and there isn’t a bit in any of them.” He blew out more smoke.
“Aren’t you going to tell somebody, Billy?” Helen Simpson asked, her eyes sparkling as they took in Billy Roberts’s quiffed hair.
“Can’t be arsed,” Billy said. “There’s some poor sod down there now – probably still down there: he’ll have something to say about it when he gets out,” he added as he did a quick glance at the entrance to see if he could see anybody returning who looked either a little sheepish or blazing with annoyance.
“That’ll be Arthur.” Edna looked ov
er her shoulder at Betty. “I bet that’s my Arthur,” she said. She tapped Billy on the shoulder. “That’ll be my Arthur,” she said again.
“What’s that, Mrs Clark?” Billy said, turning. “What’s your Arthur gone and done now?”
“He went to the toilet ages ago.”
Harriet Merkinson shuffled around in her handbag, produced a thick bundle of Kleenex and she held them out. “Here, why don’t you take him these?”
Edna nodded. “Thanks, er—”
“Harriet,” said Harriet.
“Thanks Harry – good idea.” She passed the tissues back to Billy and gave a big smile. “Here, be an angel, Billy and go back down and push these under the door for me.”
“You haven’t been down to the gents . . . have you, Mrs Clark?” There was a snigger at the last part from Jack Hanlon. “You can’t get sod all under them doors.”
“Well, can’t you knock on his door or something?” She nodded to the table behind her. “He hasn’t even finished his meal.”
Hilda looked across at Arthur’s plate and noted that it didn’t look much different to her sister’s – the only difference was that one meal was finished with and the other wasn’t.
When he got back to the toilet, Billy saw one of the waiters was already going into each cubicle to fasten a new roll of tissue into the dispenser. “Bugger me, you’re already doing it,” he said to the young man, whose face coloured immediately. “Somebody tell you, did they? Was it Arthur Clark?”
The boy shook his head and the colour on his cheeks darkened. “It was some bloke, don’t know what he’s called,” the waiter said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Said he’d come down and couldn’t find a—” The boy paused, searching for the word.
“A trap?” Billy ventured.
The boy smiled. “Said he couldn’t find a trap with any paper.” He nodded to a closed door at the end of the line of cubicles. “He’s all right now, though.”
The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 42