‘Who were you expecting?’ Amy asked.
‘That woman, in the kitchen, the one who thinks she’s the next voluptuous telly cook.’
‘Meriel,’ Amy prompted
‘Merry hell, yes.’ Ben chuckled, pleased with his own joke, no doubt planning something similar for the documentary voiceover. ‘I went down over an hour ago, you were scrubbing hell out of that old table in the corner, I asked her if I could have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. If I have to waste good filming time copying stuff for the police, I might as well have some food after all. She said she’d bring me something up.’
‘She must have forgotten.’
‘I thought she wanted to get a series out of me?’
‘Maybe she’s realised you don’t do “shows”,’ Amy said with a grin, copying Ben’s earlier tone to the policemen.
‘Yeah, or maybe she’s gone off to kill a fatted calf and present it to me, apple in mouth and fat glistening.’
‘When I last saw her she was putting the stuff she’d been prepping into the freezer. The police have insisted the pub’s closed for business.’
‘They’re not about to turn me out of my room, are they?’
‘No. Actually, another thought… Fish market.’
‘What?’
‘Tuesday. Fish market, well, more of an old transit van, comes all along the coastal villages, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, around about this time of day. That’s where Meriel’ll probably be.’
‘Whole poached sea bass I’ll be getting then?’
‘More than likely.’
They both smiled, and then Amy was suddenly aware that she was standing in Ben’s bedroom, the unmade bed astonishingly inviting, no doubt due to her lack of sleep, not at all to the lopsided grin Ben was trying out on her again.
‘I was wondering…’ she said.
‘Yes?’
The grin again; Amy wondered if his cheek ever ached. ‘The police are pretty sure Fitz committed suicide.’
‘The note’s a bit of a clue there.’
No grin this time, and Amy ignored him. ‘But I doubt Fitz even knew where the envelopes where in the office, let alone how to type and print a note as well as an envelope. He is – he was – a complete technophobe. Actually, worse than that, not phobic, he honestly didn’t care, one way or the other, he wasn’t interested in learning. I don’t believe he wrote that note.’
‘Then…’
‘Then someone else did. And that someone else may well have visited Fitz yesterday afternoon, the place was heaving, I have no idea who went up and down those steps to the Bridge. But what I do know is that Fitz was very much himself, and truly excited about what he had planned for his “Last Hurrah” as he called it. Something happened between him and one of his visitors – maybe more than one of them, I don’t know – but something must have happened. Either something that did make him kill himself – even though I can’t see him doing that, or…?’
‘Or indeed. And you think some of my footage might show who went up to see the old man?’
‘I do.’
Try as he might, Ben just couldn’t stop his dark eyes lighting up. Amy watched him as he worked it all out, in the sharpest televisual terms, she was sure – a derelict old pub, a ‘character’ of a publican, a potential suicide that segued neatly into murder. She couldn’t really blame him, he’d come all this way hoping to make a perfectly ordinary little programme that gently mocked local characters and made people up and down the country feel better about their own stolid lives from the safety of their own soft sofas, and now he’d been handed a real life actual drama. No wonder his dark eyes gleamed. To his credit, he didn’t leap up and punch his fist in the air – not that the low beams of the room would have allowed it – he simply nodded.
‘Good point. We can have a look if you like – as soon as I’ve given the copy of the footage to the police. And maybe we could have a coffee and a bite to eat while we do it?’ He looked around the bedroom, perhaps thinking of it as a suitable venue for their investigation, but something he saw in Amy’s eye prevented him from making the suggestion. ‘I’ll bring the laptop down to the bar and get set up, while you go and see what treats the lovely Meriel might have left in the fridge.’
Amy went back down to the kitchen, while Ben quickly gathered together his gear. At least her suggestion had wiped the lopsided grin off his face.
Greta sighed as she put the final tick against Cherry’s maths homework and added the sheet to the pile on the right of the desk. This was a time of day Greta usually liked. Alice – Dr Alice Kennedy – was conducting her Wednesday evening surgery; the shoulder of local lamb was roasting, with a selection of Moroccan-spiced vegetables softening under it, and sending delectable vapours upstairs; a particularly flavoursome Cabernet Sauvignon was breathing; and the setting sun was driving a magnificent, red-gold track across the dark sea.
Marking Year Nine’s maths should have been a reassuring task. Here in these dog-eared books everything was either right or wrong. Nearly right, as she always told her pupils at the start of the year, was wrong. But tonight the familiar satisfaction just wouldn’t come. Too many uncomfortable ideas were swilling about Greta’s mind.
The Admiral was dead. You couldn’t forget that if you had any sort of human kindness in you. And Greta had quite a bit. He’d turned into a buffoon in the last few years, but there had never been any malice in him; and in the old days he’d been generous and funny, as well as reasonably good-looking. Now he was dead.
In the village they were all saying the Admiral had done it himself because of the pub’s debts, but that was bonkers. In spite of the buffoonery, Fitz had never lost his essential decency, and no one who cared about other people would commit suicide without leaving a note. No way, as the girls would say. And so far the police hadn’t revealed whether there had been a note or not.
You’d have to be incredibly angry to kill yourself in a way that would land unjust suspicion on everyone you’d left behind. You’d have to be incredibly unhappy, too. Greta gazed at the heavenly view outside the small attic window of her study and couldn’t really bear the thought that Fitz’s bluff public manner might have hidden dreadful suffering.
Don’t think about it now, she told herself. It won’t do you any good. And you’ve got to finish the marking before supper or you’ll never be able to relax. And that wouldn’t be fair on Alice, not when she’s dealing with so many patients on the brink. She needs you calm and supportive just now.
Greta reached for the next worksheet and shuddered at the name written on it. Calm and supportive were not likely characteristics in anyone who’d become one of Tracy Crofts’ victims. Even so, Greta made herself pay proper attention to Tracy’s proof of Pythagoras’ theorem. However irritating the child was, her work deserved to be taken seriously. It wasn’t bad. Tracy had a brain, which made her shenanigans even more irritating. And dangerous.
In normal circumstances, Greta wouldn’t have wasted a second’s anxiety on Tracy’s idiotic threat. After all, Greta and Alice had been a fixture in Crabwell for the past seven years, most people knew they were a couple, and no one bothered about them. As Fitz himself had once said, they didn’t frighten the horses. Besides which, Alice was the best GP for miles around, and Greta had earned a great reputation for getting her girls through GCSE maths and on to higher things. There was no one else around here